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Nathaniel Stern has been producing, exhibiting, teaching, and writing about art + technology for more than 25 years. His work amplifies how nature and technology are inseparable; treats language as a material and materials as always performing meaning; embodies how art is always both an action and a call to action. Stern’s art spans sculpture, code, installation, print, imaging, networks, Blockchain, AI, performance, and more, across digital and physical realms. Generosity, dialog, and care are key to his practice: he is a teacher, writer, father, and subject matter expert, known for his dynamic public talks, panels, and interviews.

“Aesthetics are the style with which we do things; they manifest as actions and calls to action – and should never be underestimated.”

Nathaniel Stern is an artist and writer, NEA, Fulbright and NSF grantee and professor, interventionist and public citizen. He has produced and collaborated on projects ranging from ecological, participatory, and online interventions, interactive, immersive, and mixed reality environments, to prints, sculptures, videos, performances, and hybrid forms. His first book, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (Gylphi 2013), takes a close look at the stakes for interactive and digital art, and Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics (Dartmouth 2018) is a creative and scholarly collection of stories about art, artists, and their materials, which argues that ecology, aesthetics, and ethics are inherently interconnected, and together act as the cornerstone for all contemporary arts practices. Stern’s ongoing work with startups and industry, on the other hand, has helped launch dozens of new businesses, products, and ideas. He has been featured in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Guardian UK, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Washington Post, Daily News, BBC’s Today show, WIRED, Gizmodo, Time, Forbes, Fast Company, Scientific American, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Leonardo Journal of Art, Science and Technology, Rhizome, Furtherfield, and more. According to NPR, Stern’s work is “technological, thought-provoking and unexpected,” to Forbes, it is “powerful… weird, intriguing, and sometimes beautiful.” He is a “daring poet” and artist (the Verse Verse), whose work is “tremendous fun” and also “fascinating” in how it is “investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art” (Scientific American). WIRED explains that our “future is confronted [with] power and ingenuity” in Stern’s many “multimedia experiments” (Time.com), making him one of Milwaukee’s “avant-garde” (Journal Sentinel). Chicago’s widely popular Bad at Sports art podcast has said Stern produces “an obscene amount of work in an obscene amount of ways.” His “beautiful, glitched out art-images” (Boing Boing) make him ”an interesting and prolific fixture” (Artthrob.co.za), with art that is “quite possibly some of the most relevant around” (Live Out Loud magazine).

Stern holds a joint appointment as full Professor of Art and Design in Peck School of the Arts, and Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, and is a Research Associate at the Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg. He is the Director of UWM’s Startup Challenge, Executive Director and PI for the Autism Brilliance Lab for Entrepreneurship, and Co-founder of Sunflower EcoTech. He practices aesthetic activism, arts thinking, design pedagogy, and engineering processes.

“I teach artists how to engineer, engineers how to ‘art,’ and everyone how to sustain their passions.”

Stern has held solo and duo exhibitions at the Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johnson Museum of Art, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, Furtherfield Gallery, St Kate Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Institute of Visual Arts (INOVA), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and more than a dozen commercial and experimental spaces throughout the US, South Africa and Europe. His work has been shown at festivals, galleries and museums internationally, including the Venice Biennale, Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, International Symposium on Electronic Art, Transmediale, South African National Gallery, Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Austria), New Forms Festival (Canada), Haggerty Museum, Sasol Art Museum, Refraction Festival, Proof of People, NFT.NFY, International Print Center New York, Milwaukee Art Museum, the Modern and Contemporary Art Center (Hungary) and Grahamstown National Arts Festival (South Africa). Collections include the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Tezos Foundation, Northwestern Mutual, Didata, ABSA, CorpCapital, Sasol, Sanlam, Hollard, Ellerman, Hewlett Packard, SABC, Spier, turbulence.org, Contemporary Irish Art Society, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media (Cornell University), and the Universities of South Africa and the Witwatersrand; he is in private collections all over the world. Stern has published with MIT Press, Taylor & Francis, Dartmouth College, Routledge, Open Humanities Press, Wiley, Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge Scholars, Rodopi, Gylphi Limited, and the University of Amsterdam, among others.

Nathaniel lives in a house built in 1917 on the East Side of Milwaukee Wisconsin, with his wife, 5 children, a fish, a bird, a couple of gerbils, a lizard, a frog, some butterflies, and a cat that often tries to kill all of them.

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CV Downloads: Artist CV (9 pages), Abbreviated Resume (2 pages),
Academic CV (12 pages), or Unabridged Academic CV (35 pages)