Michael Naimark

Michael Naimark has worked in immersive and emerging media for over four decades. He has directed and advised on projects with support from Apple, Disney, Microsoft, Atari, Panavision, Lucasfilm, and Paul Allen’s Interval Research; and from National Geographic, UNESCO, the Rockefeller Foundation, NY MoMA, the Banff Centre, Ars Electronica, and the Paris Metro. He’s listed as lead inventor on 16 issued patents relating to cameras, display, haptics, and live; and his work has been seen in nearly 400 art exhibitions, film festivals, and presentations around the world. Since 2009, Michael has held faculty positions at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, USC Cinema’s Interactive Media and Games Division, and the MIT Media Lab.

From 2017 to 2021, Michael served as visiting faculty in Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai, where he developed a VR/AR curriculum and directed research into live, online, glasses-free tele-immersion. Prior to that, in 2015-16, he was Google’s first-ever VR resident artist. Michael’s early work in projection mapping is listed “#3” in Wikipedia (after Disney and George Harrison). He’s a founding editorial board member of Presence Journal (MIT Press) and a longtime advisor-at-large to ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s Global Jukebox Project. His artwork is in the permanent collections of the Exploratorium, the Centre for Arts and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, and the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York.