Bio, CV, ORCID, Contact

(100 words)
Paul Catanese (b. 1975) is a hybrid media artist, author, and researcher whose work brings together technologies, materials, and modes of making across the physical, computational, and performative. Working with printmaking, creative coding, performance, installation, sound, video, and digital fabrication, his practice is shaped by experimentation, collection, and unexpected relationships among images, objects, systems, and processes. A 2024 Fulbright Scholar, Catanese is developing a forthcoming Bloomsbury Visual Arts book on artificial intelligence, printmaking, and hybrid material futures. Exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Chicago Cultural Center.

(600 words)
Paul Catanese (b. 1975) is a hybrid media artist, author, and researcher whose work brings together disparate technologies, materials, and modes of making to create forms that move between physical, computational, and performative spaces. Working across printmaking, creative coding, performance, installation, sound, video, and digital fabrication, his practice has long been shaped by experimentation, collection, and the unexpected relationships that emerge among images, objects, systems, and processes.

Catanese’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Chicago Cultural Center, New Museum of Contemporary Art, China Academy of Art, Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Symposium on Electronic Art, La Villette, FILE, Stuttgart Filmwinter, and Carriageworks. His projects have been supported through commissions, grants, fellowships, and residencies from organizations including Rhizome, Turbulence, Kala Art Institute, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, PLAYA, Signal Culture, Goldwell Open Air Museum, SPACES, the Institute for Electronic Arts, the City of Chicago, Illinois Arts Council, and New York Foundation for the Arts.

His earlier work includes browser-based generative drawing, electronic artists’ books, experimental interfaces, projection, and virtual environments, reflecting a long-standing interest in how computational systems migrate into physical and performative forms. Rather than treating digital and material practices as separate domains, Catanese has consistently approached them as interdependent processes. This movement between code, image, object, space, and performance has remained a defining feature of his practice across successive generations of technologies, tools, and media.

Visible From Space, supported by an Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship and presented at the Chicago Cultural Center, combined drawing, telepresence, aerial imaging, and participatory performance in a project described by Patrick Lichty in Furtherfield as a “hybrid drawing dirigible telepresence opera.” Century of Progress / Sleep developed through Catanese’s 2018–19 Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-in-Residence appointment at Colgate University and culminated in an ensemble production at the Ho-Tung Visualization Lab Planetarium as well as a studio recording released on LP.

In 2024, Catanese was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Poland, based at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, where he researched intersections among artificial intelligence, printmaking, and material practice. That research continues in a forthcoming book from Bloomsbury Visual Arts examining artificial intelligence, generative systems, creative practice, and hybrid material futures. The project extends questions developed across his earlier work concerning matrix, image, material intelligence, authorship, and creative process. These concerns also inform Bruno’s Infinities, a recent body of work spanning generative systems, printmaking, performance, historical research, synthetic media, and speculative reconstruction.

Catanese is the author of Director’s Third Dimension (2001), a book on real-time 3D programming for interactive media, and co-author of Post-Digital Printmaking: CNC, Traditional, and Hybrid Techniques (2012), which examines the integration of computer-controlled processes with traditional printmaking.

For over twenty-five years, Catanese held faculty and academic leadership roles at San Francisco State University and Columbia College Chicago, where he was Professor of Art and Director of Graduate Studies for Art and Art History. He currently serves on the SECAC Board of Directors as the at-large representative for the Midwest region, and his professional service has included two terms as President of the New Media Caucus (2009–2014) as well as service with the College Art Association. He earned an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000 and a BA in Theater from SUNY Geneseo in 1997. His artwork is held in collections including the Rhizome Artbase at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University, the Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries at Wright State University, the Center for Art + Environment Archives at the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.


Curriculum Vitae [PDF]

ORCID: 0009-0008-5553-5252

catanese.paul [at] gmail.com