Avital Meshi is a New Media Artist. She recently graduated her MFA from The Digital Art and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz and she holds a BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a BSc and an MSc in behavioral biology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Meshi’s practice focuses on the way people connect with one another through new media and technologies such as video games, virtual worlds and artificial intelligence. In her work, she creates large scale, immersive installations where she implements elements of these new technologies and invites viewers to interact with them in an unusual way. Inspired by ideas of relational aesthetics, she utilizes tools of participatory performance which allow participants to become engaged and see themselves and others through the lens of these technologies. Meshi’s goal is to create a space where questions can be asked and conversions can take place. Her installations usually provoke conversations regarding ideas of identity and social roles, role-playing, identity tourism, cultural appropriation, virtual communities, machine based surveillance,  face recognition and classification.

Previous exhibitions include a solo show at the 'Digital Art Demo Space' in Chicago and group exhibitions in 'Currents New Media' festival in Santa Fe, Root Division Gallery in San-Francisco, ACM SIGGRAPH, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago and more. 

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Avital Meshi was born and raised in Israel. She currently lives and works in the San-Francisco bay area.