Vibeke Sorensen is an artist and professor specializing in digital multimedia, experimental animation, interactive installations, wearable technologies, and visual music. Her internationally recognized work has been featured in film festivals, exhibitions, and publications, earning numerous awards.
She was Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore from 2009 to 2021, serving as Chair (Head of School) of the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) and Founding Director of the Centre for Asian Art and Design (CAAD), during which ADM rose to #30 in the QS World University Rankings. From 2021 to 2022, she was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, and she is currently External Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna.
Sorensen previously founded and chaired the Division of Animation and Digital Arts at the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts (1994–2004), and directed the Computer Animation Laboratory at CalArts (1984–1994). She taught at Princeton University and was an artist-in-residence at Caltech. She co-founded the Advanced Scientific Visualization Laboratory at the University of California San Diego / San Diego Supercomputer Center, and consulted for Disney and NASA. In 2007, she chaired the ACM SIGGRAPH Art Gallery: Global Eyes.
Her creative work has been supported by major institutions including the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Rockefeller Foundation, and Intel. She received distinguished honors such as the 2001 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the 2005 Knight Distinguished Visiting Lectureship from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and the Catedra from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 2006.
Since 2009, her work has focused on Southeast Asian cosmologies, including works such as Illuminations (2013), Vishwaroop (2014), Mayur (2015), and Calendar Music (2018). In 2020, her work Colour Music of the Balinese Calendar was the focus of an ETH Zurich exhibition at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial. In 2023–2024, she conceived and designed a large-scale immersive light-music installation-instrument to illuminate the fundamental polyrhythmic structure of Balinese Uku Calendar. Using dichroic glass and physical computing, it was complemented by a 360-degree dome film, The Balinese Calendar and the Colour Music of Time (2024-2025), produced in collaboration with John Stephen Lansing, Biju Dhanapalan, M. Jayachandran, Ross Adrian Williams, and Nagaraju Thummanapalli. With thanks Quantum Temple for inclusion of Paths to Alango, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the European Southern Observatory for additional Full dome format space footage.
In 2022, her environmentally themed work Tree Dress (2020) was featured in the online ACM SIGGRAPH DAC Exhibition, The Earth, Our Home: Art, Technology and Critical Action, and installed with live plant sensors at the Descanso Gardens, Sturt Haaga Gallery in Daphne’s Wardrobe from March – June 2025. Catalog: https://www.descansogardens.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/daphneswardrobe.pdf
A retrospective of her computer graphics and visual music work (1975–1993) was held in 2024 at the Santa Monica College Barrett Gallery, and her 9-monitor NLOOPS installation was installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Digital Witness Exhibition in 2024-2025.
An online Masterclass interview with Sorensen about her work in abstraction, conducted by Punto y Raya / Abstract Art in Motion Festival in 2021, was released in 2024 and is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftGNo-XzeQ
Vimeo Link:
https://vimeo.com/1130055938?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci#t=0