Shelley Lake

Shelley Lake (born 1954, Miami Beach, Florida) is an American digital artist whose work brings together fine art, technology and the imagination. Working in partnership with what she calls intelligent machines, she creates an artificial reality of superheroes, erotic men and women, wireframe meshworks, anatomical investigations, cybernetic creatures and phantasmagoric depictions of impossible people, places and things: images that often resemble our photo-real existence yet are utterly unreal and sometimes uncanny.

She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1976 and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979, where she became the first female graduate of the Architecture Machine Group, the institution now known as the MIT Media Lab, and trained with Nicholas Negroponte and Harold Edgerton, pioneers in the fusion of science, art and technology. She also holds a Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Cleveland Chiropractic College (1997) and completed a Master of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2021.

Lake was among the pioneers of computer animation and imaging in the 1980s. She was a technical director on The Last Starfighter, for which the production received an Academy Award for technical achievement, won a Clio Award for the STP Oil Treatment animation Engine in 1986 after Clio recognitions in 1984 and 1985, placed first in the AT&T Image Contest in 1987 with Teapot, and took the Still Picture Grand Prize at NICOGRAPH in Tokyo in 1989. Her work of those years was shown at the ACM SIGGRAPH art shows, the Laforet Museum in Tokyo, the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris, The Kitchen in New York and film festivals from Berlin and Montreal to Chicago and San Francisco, often in collaboration with Hearn.

Her later photography and digital imaging has been exhibited widely in Florida, at the Orlando Museum of Art, the von Liebig Art Center in Naples, Aldo Castillo Gallery in Estero and in solo booths at Spectrum during Art Basel Miami from 2016 to 2018, as well as at Tate Modern in London (Computer Baroque, 2009), the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the NEoN Digital Arts Festival in Dundee and Galerie Danysz in Paris. She has won a Photoshop Guru Award, Epson International Pano Awards, Aurora Awards grand prizes for architectural photography and many Orlando Camera Club and Orlando Museum of Art honors. Her work is held in collections including the Orlando Museum of Art, The Kitchen, Apple Computer, the American Embassy in Nigeria, the Amway Center and the Human Rights Campaign Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and has been featured in ARTnews, Art in America, Artforum, Computer Graphics World and an Inside Artists interview in 2018.