BIOGRAPHY
Artist and educator John Craig Freeman uses digital technologies to produce place-based virtual reality installations made up of projected interactive environments that lead the audience from global satellite images to immersive, user navigated scenes on the ground. As one explores these virtual spaces, the story of the place unfolds in a montage of nonlinear media. The "Imaging Place" project has been under development since 1997 and includes work from Sao Paulo Brazil, Kamloops BC Canada, Warsaw Poland, the U.S./Mexico Border, Miami, Kaliningrad Russia, Niagara, New England, and Appalachia.
This work has been exhibited internationally including at the Zacheta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki (the national gallery of Warsaw), Kaliningrad Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Russia, Art Basel Miami, Ciberart Bilbao and the Girona Video and Digital Arts Festival in Spain, the Westside Gallery in New York City, La Biblioteca National in Havana, the Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary, the Center for Experimental and Perceptual Art (CEPA) in Buffalo, Mobius and Studio Soto in Boston, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, Ambrosino Gallery in Miami, the Photographers Gallery in London, and the Friends of Photography's Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco. In 1992 he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has been published in Leonardo, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Exposure, as well as a chapter in the book Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities. His work has been reviewed in Wired News, Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harper's and Der Spiegel. Lucy Lippard cites Freeman's work in her book "The Lure of the Local", as does Margot Lovejoy in her book "Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age".
Freeman received a Bachelor of Art degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990.
He began his academic career in the early 1990s in San Diego where he lectured at the University Of California San Diego for three and a half years. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida from 1994 to 1999, where he coordinated the Photography Area. From 1999 to 2002 he ran the digital media art curriculum as an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is currently an Associate Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston. The focus of his academic activities throughout the last decade has been to integrate computer technology and theory of electronic culture into visual art curriculum and to explore interdisciplinary approaches to education and technology. He is active in the College Art Association and has served on the national board of directors of the Society for Photographic Education.