​Mary Flanagan, United States / France

Mary Flanagan is an artist based in France and the US. Her transdisciplinary work focuses on the tensions between the digital, the analog, and play, and often uses games in her work.  Her approach involves both onscreen space as well as physical spaces, objects, and actions. She sees the computer as a collaborator and pursues collisions with aleatory events, chance operations and glitched code as she constructs and deconstructs technologies and play. Mary has exhibited internationally at venues such as The Guggenheim New York, Tate Britain, Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia Lisbon, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Cologne, and the Whitney Biennial of American Art. 

Mary won the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica in the Interactive art+ for her work interrogating facial recognition systems, [help me know the truth]. She was honored with the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship, the Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and has been awarded artistic residencies with the Brown Foundation, MacDowell, Bogliasco, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. She has lectured widely including at Oxford, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, and the Sorbonne, and was a John Paul Getty Museum Scholar, a Senior Scholar in Residence at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto and received an Honoris Causa in Design, Illinois Institute of Technology.

In addition to her creative practice, Mary is also a game designer and the author of numerous books and essays. She is also an educator, and holds an endowed professorship in emerging fields at Dartmouth College in the US, where she teaches new media and video art, game design, and experimental practices. She holds a PhD from University of the Arts London (Central St Martins) as well as two Masters degrees in media.

​Meet Mary at her Atelier 11 Open Studio on 19 June 2025 ​as part of Le Printemps du Dessin for an opportunity to learn about her recent visual project "Colonial Geometries" and to discuss her digital to analog processes.