Camille Utterback


Camille Utterback is an interactive installation artist. Initially trained as a painter, her work is at the intersection of painting and interactive art.

Biography

Utterback received her undergraduate degree from Williams College and her master's degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She is currently an Assistant Professor of the Art and Art History Department at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco, California.

Artwork

Examples of her work include Text Rain, created in collaboration with Romy Achituv, in which participants use their bodies to lift and play with falling letters projected on a wall, and Shifting Times, a public installation in San Jose, California that creates interactive projects based on the movements of pedestrians. Helen Lessick describes the latter as a "blending screens of twentieth and twenty-first century San José" in which the "images split and weave, shift between color and black and white, invoking loss and possibility, site and memory."
Utterback says that she is interested in getting people to “think about the difference between something conceptual and something physical” and to “make a hypothesis, and then test it with their bodies.”
Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, Smithsonian American Art Museum GAFFTA, the Ars Electronica Center and the NTT InterCommunication Center.
Utterback created an installation called Precarious for the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now, which opened in May, 2018.

Awards

She has received several grants and awards including the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship and the Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award and, in 2009, a "genius award" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Utterback has taught media art at Parsons School of Design, and the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.