Tamiko Thiel

In 2024 Tamiko Thiel was recognized with the SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award in Digital Art and inducted into the AWE XR Hall of Fame for her socially critical media artworks exploring place, space, the body, and cultural identity. 
She was the lead product designer on the first commercial AI supercomputers Connection Machines CM-1/CM-2 (1986/87), which influenced Google’s technology and Steve Jobs’ design aesthetic. Her works in VR include Starbright World, first metaverse for children (1994–1997, with Steven Spielberg) and Beyond Manzanar (2000, in the collections of the San Jose Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution). 
Her works in AR began withARt Critic Face Matrix in an intervention into MoMA NY (2010) and Shades of Absence in a Venice Biennale Intervention (2011). AR works in collections include Unexpected Growth (2018, Whitney Museum NY), ReWildAR (2021, Smithsonian Institution), ARpothecary’s Garden (2022, Kunstsammlung Roche Basel), and Vera Plastica (2023, BROICH Digital Art Foundation).