Location: San Jose, CA
Medium: installation, video, digital art, sculpture, photography
Website: rhondaholberton.com
Rhonda Holberton was born in 1981 in Falls Church, Virginia. She received a BFA from the California College of the Arts in 2007 and an MFA from Stanford University in 2012, where she later returned as a lecturer from 2015 to 2017. She lives and works in the San Jose area, where she serves as Associate Professor of Digital Media and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at San José State University.
Holberton’s work has been recognized with numerous fellowships and grants, including the Knight Arts and Technology Fellowship (2026), a Simons Foundation Open Interval Grant (2025), a Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artist Residency Fellowship (2023–2026), the Fondation Ténot Fellowship in Paris, and an NEA Grant for Arts Projects. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, and the McEvoy Family Collection.
She has been an artist in residence at CAMAC in Marnay-sur-Seine, France (2014), Kala Art Institute in Berkeley (2014–2015), Autodesk (2016), and La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland. Her gallery representation has included CULT Aimee Friberg in San Francisco.
Holberton utilizes technology as a medium to reconcile the biological body with geologic time, revealing the material and environmental consequences of human life at both individual and planetary scales. Her practice spans subtle animations, digital interventions, sculptures, and immersive installations that move between the material and immaterial, the authentic and the synthetic. Recurring concerns include the phenomenology of climate change, humanity’s entanglement with military and surveillance technologies, and the ethics of digital platforms. Works have incorporated 3D body scanning, motion capture, virtual reality, AI-generated imagery, fragrance, live biological organisms, and materials sourced from nuclear test sites and military facilities.
In her more recent work, Holberton has collaborated with AI systems to generate speculative fiction about post-climate futures, using those outputs to seed paintings, sculptures, and video animations. Her practice consistently draws on scientific frameworks—from neuroscience to geology—while remaining attentive to the lived, embodied experience of existing in technologically saturated environments.
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