Bio

Shawn Lawson is a visual artist & media programmer exploring the edges of perceptual and experiential consciousness. He works with concepts that manifest just on the fringes of what appears perceivable or believable.

His artworks have exhibited at Milwaukee Art Museum, Chelsea Art Museum, Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, Koltsovo International Airport, Albany Institute of History and Art, Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, Art Interactive Gallery, Art Chicago, ACM Siggraph, IEEE Procams, ACM Multimedia, Immedia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Ohio State University, Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and more. Lawson's artwork has toured to Russia, Portugal, Brazil, Turkey, and Malaysia. Lawson's collaborative, Crudeoils, is represented by Dean Jensen Gallery and Flatfile Galleries. His artwork has been funded by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts and the Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds Program.

Lawson studied fine arts at Carnegie Mellon University and École Nationale Supèrieure des Beaux-Arts. He received his MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Before becoming an Assistant Professor of Computer Visualization at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2004, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, an Artist in Residence in the virtual reality research group Stage3 at Carnegie Mellon University, and an intern at Walt Disney Imagineering with the DisneyQuest project.