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Ellen Sandor, Founding Artist & Director, (art)n

Ellen Sandor is an internationally recognized multimedia artist and pioneer in digital media. Throughout the 1970s, she created mixed media environments and sculptures, and received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her passion for photography, technology, and outsider art inspired her to invent a new methodology for producing art, and a new medium of expression for the digital age.

In 1981, she created a unique large-scale three-dimensional photographic mural commissioned by a private collector. This immersive installation combined photography and sculpture with the visual illusion of holography and other Op-Art forms. From the success of this project, Sandor formed a collaborative group of artists in 1983 with her peers from The School of the Art Institute called (art)n. The first project they produced, called PHSCologram ‘83, is an early example of a virtual reality environment in an artistic context, and opened a dialogue with other artists working in digital media.

Since the early 1980s, a large body of work has been produced under Sandor’s direction by the (art)n collective and numerous collaborators. From early tributes to artists to virtual portraits, science as art, visual history, video game culture and recent works with Chicago Imagists, these large ensemble projects have been shown worldwide in galleries, museums, symposia and in the media, and have been collected by private individuals as well as distinguished institutions.

Sandor and (art)n's works are in the permanent collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, International Center of Photography in New York, Fred Jones Jr. Museum at the University of Oklahoma, and others. Commissioned projects include the Battle of Midway Memorial at Chicago’s Midway Airport for the Public Art Program and City of Chicago, and unique installations for the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Smithsonian Institution, Cranbrook Institute of Science, and Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Ellen Sandor has co-authored published papers for Computers & Graphics, IEEE and other publications and has lectured by invitation in Europe, Canada and the United States. She is a former Collaborator/Associate Professor at the Department of Art and Design at the College of Design, Iowa State University, co-founder of the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection and a former Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an Affiliate of eDream, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Sandor remains an active member of the Chicago community and is the Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is on the Board of Directors for INTUIT (Society for Outsider, Intuitive and Visionary Art), OXBOW, Lawyers for the Creative Arts, and the Board of Governors for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.