George Legrady (born in 1950, in Budapest) is a multidisciplinary, interactive media artist. He began his photographic artistic practice in Montreal. In 1973, he received his first major project, a photo documentary in northern Quebec of four James Bay Cree communities in response to the James Bay Cree hydroelectric conflict. Following graduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute in the mid 1970s, his work resulted in numerous projects that focused on a semiotic analysis of the photographic image. In 1985, he produced a photo documentary on the visual syntax of public billboards in four major Chinese cities.
Legrady began to explore the potential of digital technologies in the early 1980s in the studio of Harold Cohen at the University of California in San Diego. His contribution to the digital media field since the early stages of its formation in the early 1990s has been in intersecting cultural content with data processing. This is a means of creating aesthetic and socio-cultural narrative experiences. In 1997, the digital catalog of his solo museum exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Photography, tracing the transition from photography to interactive media installations in his artworks, is now featured online at the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Arts, Science, & Technology.
His most significant interactive digital media arts projects include the “Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War” in 1993, “Slippery Traces” in 1995, published by the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, and the internationally traveling “Pockets Full of Memories” in 2001-2006, which was commissioned by the Centre Pompidou. His data visualization project "Making Visible the Invisible" for the Seattle Central Library will be operational until 2014. It was featured in the Whitney Museum Artport in 2005.
He is Director of the Experimental Visualization Lab in the Media Arts & Technology doctoral program at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He has previously taught at the University of Western Ontario, the California Institute of the Arts, the University of Southern California, the San Francisco State University, and the Merz Akademie of Visual Communication.