Lillian Schwartz

Lillian Schwartz (1927-2024) was an American artist recognized as a pioneer of computer-mediated art, among the first to build an entire artistic practice around computational media. Working as a resident visitor at Bell Labs from 1969 to 2002, where she collaborated extensively with software engineer Ken Knowlton, she created ten pioneering digitally animated films by 1975, including Pixillation and Olympiad, combining hand painting, digital collaging, computer graphics and optical post-processing. She became known for the Mona Leo theory, which used computer analysis to argue that Leonardo da Vinci's self-portrait shares structural similarities with the Mona Lisa. Schwartz trained as a nurse at Cincinnati College of Nursing and Health before studying calligraphy in Japan and taking programming classes at the New School for Social Research. She won an Emmy Award in 1984, received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award in 2015, and died October 12, 2024, at age 97.