Marina Zurkow

Marina Zurkow works with character and narrative in animated cartoons, interactive installations, print and pop objects. Zurkow’s recent projects include The Space Invaders, a site-specific single channel video for WNET/PBS in New York; and the seven channel animated installation, Nicking the Never which premiered at FACT in the U.K. in 2004. She created the award-winning episodic cartoon Braingirl, chronicling a mutant-cute girl who wears her insides on the outside; Pussy Weevil, or How I Learned to Love the War, with a vile cartoon persona who reacts to a viewer’s proximity; and PDPal, a public art project for screen, web and mobile devices that allows a user to “write her own city” (with architect Scott Paterson and technologist Julian Bleecker). Zurkow’s icons and characters have been incorporated into films, hotel design, lightboxes and clothing. Upcoming projects include Karaoke Ice, a truck with a persona that stages karaoke battles for ISEA/the San Jose Biennial in 2006, and Funnelhead, which will be realized as a graphic novel and as an animated, sculptural installation.

Zurkow’s work has been exhibited at Sundance, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Ars Electronica, Creative Time, The Kitchen, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, SFMoMA, Eyebeam Atelier, and bitforms gallery, and has been broadcast on MTV, Fuji TV and PBS. She is a 2005 NYFA Fellow, a 2003 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, and received grants in 2005 from the New York State Council on the Arts, in 2001-2002 from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation and the Walker Art Center. She teaches at NYUâs Interactive Technology Program (ITP) and lives in Brooklyn.

At the Lucas Artists Programs Zurkow will be working with Nancy Nowacek and Katie Salen on a project for the ISEA2006 Symposium/Zero One San Jos?: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, to be held in August 2006 in San Jose, CA.