Steve Dietz

Founder, Artistic Director, 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge

Founder, Executive Director, Northern Lights

Steve Dietz is the founding Artistic Director of the biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge, and the founder and Executive Director of Northern Lights, an interactive media-oriented, arts agency, which presents innovative art in the public sphere, focusing on artists creatively using technology to engender new relations between audience and artwork and more broadly between citizenry and their built environment. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. He founded one of the earliest, museum-based, independent new media programs at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1992. Dietz has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions including “Beyond Interface” (1998), “Art Entertainment Network” (2000), “The Art Formerly Known As New Media” 2005, and “Superlight” (2008). He is co-curating with Christiane Paul “FEEDFORWARD: Angel of History” at LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre in Gijon, Spain, in October 2009, and the 3rd 01SJ Biennial on the theme of “Build Your Own World” will take place in San Jose, CA, September 16-19, 2010. Dietz has written extensively and speaks widely about the art formerly known as new media.