David Em is an American artist whose pioneering digital art has been published and exhibited internationally.

Em grew up in South America in the 1950s. He studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and set up his first art studio in San Francisco in 1972, where he experimented with analog video synthesis.

He created his first digital images at the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1975. In 1976, he went on to build articulated 3D creatures with mainframes at Information International Incorporated, Hollywood's first digital film studio.

As Artist-in-Residence at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1977 to 1984, he became the first ­fine artist to construct navigable virtual worlds, following that with an Artist-in-Residency at the California ­Institute of Technology from 1985 to 1988, and at Apple Computer in 1991.

Starting in the mid-1990s and into the 2010s, Em crafted an evolving network of computers and software at his independent art studio in Sierra Madre, California. Since 2022, his focus has been on exploring the boundaries of generative AI. 

David Em is the first digital artist to have his working papers collected by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. He currently lives an works in northern Colorado. To learn more about his life and art, click here.