Tamiko Thiel

Tamiko Thiel is an American visual artist of mixed Japanese and German heritage.

She was recognized with the 2024 SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement in Digital Arts Award and in 2024 also inducted into the AWE XR Hall of Fame for her media artworks illuminating the inner workings of natural, social and cultural systems. Earlier awards include 2018 SAT Montreal Visionary Pioneer Award and 2009 IBM Innovation Award in Art and Technology.

Thiel received her B.S. in 1979 from Stanford University in Product Design Engineering, with an emphasis on human factors. She received her M.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1983 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with a focus on human-machine design at the Biomechanics Lab and computer graphics at the precursors to the MIT Media Lab. She then earned a Diploma (M.A. equivalent) in Applied Graphics in 1991 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, specializing in video installation art.

She was lead product designer on Danny Hillis’ Connection Machines CM-1/CM-2 (1986/1987) at the MIT AI Lab startup Thinking Machines Corporation These were the first commercial artificial intelligence supercomputers and the fastest supercomputers in the world in 1989 (CM-2) and 1993 (CM-5). These machines influenced Google’s AI technology, inspired Steve Jobs‘ designs, and are in the collections of MoMA NY and the Smithsonian Institution. Her own AI artworks include Lend Me Your Face! (2020, with /p) deepfake video installation, and I am Sound (2016, with Christoph Reiserer) a generative audio visual selfie installation.

Her first VR was as producer/creative director of Starbright World (1994-1997), the first Metaverse for children, in collaboration with Steven Spielberg. Her own VR artwork Beyond Manzanar (2000, with Zara Houshmand), an interactive large screen VR projection installation, was the first VR artwork collected by a US art museum (San Jose Museum of Art, 2002). The second edition was purchased by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2025. Subsequent VR artworks include The Travels of Mariko Horo (2006, with music by Ping Jin), funded by a Japan Foundation fellowship and an MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies fellowship, and Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall (2008, T+T (Tamiko Thiel and Teresa Reuter)), funded by a Berlin Capital City Cultural Funds grant and winner of the IBM Innovation Award for Artistic Creation in Art and Technology at the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival. Using more recent VR technology she created Land of Cloud (2017) as GoogleVR Tilt Brush Artist in Residence, which won the audience award at the inaugural VRHAM Festival in 2018. She created the VR artwork Atmos Sphaerae (2021) for the exhibition „Dis/Location,“ curated by Whitney Museum media art curator Christiane Paul for the DiMoDA 4.0 VR virtual museum.

A founding member of the augmented reality (AR) artist group Manifest.AR, she participated in 2010 in the pathbreaking AR intervention “We AR in MoMA,” an uninvited guerilla takeover of MoMA New York. Thiel’s ARt Critic Face Matrix at MoMA was featured in articles in the New York Times and on WNYC (National Public Radio). In 2011 she led the Manifest.AR Venice Biennial AR Intervention, placing her work series Shades of Absence in Piazza San Marco and the Venice Giardini. Invitational AR shows and new commissions included the ICA Boston, the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, Biomer Skelters (2013, with Will Pappenheimer) at FACT Liverpool, Brush the Sky (2015, with Midori Kono Thiel) at Wing Luke Museum of the Asian-Pacific Experience, Gardens of the Anthropocene (2016) at the Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Park, Unexpected Growth (2018, with /p) at the Whitney Museum (the 1st edition is in the collection and the 2nd edition was auctioned as a NFT at Christie's NY), ReWildAR (2021, with /p) at the 175th anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution and now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, ARpothecary’s Garden (2022), commissioned by and for the Roche Art Collection Basel, What You Sow (2023, with /p), for the AR Biennial of the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, Vera Plastica (2023, with /p), commissioned for the BROICH Digital Art Museum collection by DAM Projects Berlin, and ParadoQc/Machines (2025, with /p) on quantum computing, commissioned by the ERES Foundation and developed in collaboration with quantum physicists from the Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology.