Casey Reas is an American artist and professor who works with software and digital processes to create art. He is best known for co-creating the open source programming language Processing with Ben Fry.
Casey Reas is an American artist and professor of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is best known for his work in software art, which combines elements of computer programming, mathematics, and visual art. Reas has been creating software art since the late 1990s, and his work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world.
Reas was born in Los Angeles in 1972 and received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1994. He then went on to receive his Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. After graduating, Reas began to explore the potential of computer programming as an artistic medium. He developed a series of software artworks, which he called “Processing”, that combined elements of computer programming, mathematics, and visual art.
Reas’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Modern in London. He has also been featured in numerous publications, including Wired, The New York Times, and The Guardian.
In addition to his artistic practice, Reas is also a professor of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has taught courses on software art, digital media, and creative coding. He is also the co-founder of Processing, an open-source programming language and environment for creating interactive visualizations and digital art.
Reas’s work has been widely acclaimed and has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2006 and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts in 2011. He has also been named a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.