With an eclectic background combining elements of painting and programming, Ira Greenberg has been a painter, 2D and 3D animator, print designer, web and interactive designer/developer, programmer, art director, creative director, managing director, art professor, and author. He wrote the first major language reference on the Processing language, Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art, friends of ED, 2007. Ira holds a BFA from Cornell University and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Ira has steadily exhibited his work, consulted within industry, and lectured widely throughout his career. He was affiliated with the Flywheel Gallery in Piermont, New York, and the Bowery Gallery in New York City. He was a managing director and creative director for H2O Associates in New York's Silicon Alley, where he helped build a new media division during the golden days of the dot-com boom and then bust—barely parachuting back to safety in the ivory tower. Since then, he has been inciting students to create inspirational new media art; lecturing; and holding residencies at numerous institutions, including Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland), University of Edinburgh (UK), University of Iowa, University of Northern Iowa, Seton Hall University; Monmouth University; University of California, Santa Barbara; Kutztown University; Moravian College; Northampton Community College's Digital Art Institute; Lafayette College; Lehigh University; the Art Institute of Seattle; Studio Art Centers International (in Florence, Italy); and the City and Guilds of London Art School (UK).
Currently, Ira is Associate Professor at Miami University (Ohio), where he has a joint appointment within the School of Fine Arts and Interactive Media Studies program. He is also an affiliate member of the Department of Computer Science and Systems Analysis. His research interests include aesthetics and computation, expressive programming, emergent forms, net-based art, artificial intelligence (and stupidity), physical computing, and computer art pedagogy (and anything else that tickles his fancy). One of his passions is torturing defenseless art students with trigonometry, algorithms, and object-oriented programming, and he is excited to spread this passion to the rest of the world.
Ira lives in charming Oxford, Ohio with his wife, Robin; his son, Ian; his daughter, Sophie; their squirrel-obsessed dog, Heidi; and their night prowler cat, Moonshadow.
When not sitting aimlessly in front of his laptop, you can usually find Ira getting smooshed against the boards at the local ice rink.
