Rachel Clarke, born in Shropshire, UK, is a visual artist and Professor of New Media Art at California State University, Sacramento. Working across drawing, animation, experimental 3D, augmented reality, video, and installation, she moves between physical and virtual forms. Her work traces questions of loss, transformation, place, and humanity’s conflicted relationship with the environments on which it depends. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, new media festivals, and film screenings in the United States and internationally.
Selected exhibitions include the NEWART Centre, Reus, Spain; Bronx Art Space, New York; Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami; ISEA, Vancouver, Canada; Another Year in LA, Los Angeles; Balance/Unbalance at Arizona State University, Phoenix; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Aggregate Space, Oakland; WORK Detroit; and Currents International Festival of New Media, Santa Fe. Her residencies include Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan (2026); Hochschule für Musik und Kunst, Hamburg (2018); and Signal Culture, Owego, New York (2016).
Her curatorial and collaborative projects include Broadway Augmented, an NEA-funded augmented-reality public art project developed in collaboration with the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission and located in Sacramento’s Broadway Corridor. Clarke served as artist, co-curator, technical director, and supervisor for the project, which launched in 2014. In 2022, she curated and presented an exhibition of augmented-reality works for the New Media Caucus’s Future Bodies Symposium at Virginia Tech. In 2011, she co-curated The Real-Fake: Simulation Technology after Photography with artist Claudia Hart; the exhibition toured in the United States in 2012. The project was later expanded as Real-Fake.org.2.0, with screenings in New York in 2016 and in Connecticut and Providence in 2017. Clarke was also a CATE (Conversations at the Edge) visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017.
Clarke served on the Board of the New Media Caucus from 2005 to 2020 and is the founding editor of its international journal, Media-N. She is one of the general editors of Bloomsbury’s forthcoming Encyclopedia of New Media Art, scheduled for publication in 2026.