Michael Naimark works in virtual reality and new media art as artist, inventor, scholar, and consultant. His work has been seen in nearly 400 art exhibitions, film festivals, and presentations around the world; and he’s listed as lead inventor on 16 issued patents relating to cameras, display, haptics, and live. Michael has taught 20 different classes at 9 universities over 4 decades including, since 2009, at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, USC Cinema’s Interactive Media and Games Division, and the MIT Media Lab. Michael has consulted and directed 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.

Since 2017, Michael has served as visiting faculty in Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai, where he developed a VR/AR curriculum and directed research into live, online, tele-immersion, (which included a cheap simple hack for improving online classwork). Prior to that, in 2015-16, he was Google’s first-ever VR resident artist. Michael’s early work in projection mapping, including an art installation at SFMOMA in 1984, 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.