Tamiko Thiel is a new media artist interested in developing the dramatic and narrative capabilities of interactive 3D virtual reality as a medium for addressing social and cultural issues. She received her B.S. in 1979 from Stanford University in Product Design Engineering with a focus on human factors design. Her M.S. was in Mechanical Engineering in 1983 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied human-machine design at the Biomechanics Lab and computer graphics at the precursors to the Media Lab. She then studied studio art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, where she received a Diploma in Applied Graphics in 1991, specializing in video installation art.

She exhibits internationally in venues such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Siggraph, ISEA and the ICA/London. She was creative director and producer of Starbright World, an award-winning 3D online virtual playspace for seriously ill children done in collaboration with film director and Starbright Foundation chairman Steven Spielberg. Her virtual reality installation Beyond Manzanar is in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art in Silicon Valley, California, USA. The work is discussed in Whitney Museum media art curator Christiane Paul’s reference book Digital Art (Thames and Hudson World of Art series) and in Boston University Professer Matt Smith’s book The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2006.) Her newest work The Travels of Mariko Horo, a reverse Marco Polo fantasy about a Japanese woman who constructs the West, will premiere in the “Edge Conditions” exhibit held jointly by ZeroOne and the San Jose Museum of Art as part of the Pacific Rim Theme of the ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA 2006 Symposium. A work in progress is Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall, a virtual reality installation on the Berlin Wall.

She has taught and lectured internationally at institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, the MIT Media Lab, the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany, University of California/San Diego, the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television and the School of Film and Television in Babelsberg, Germany.

In 2003 she was a Japan Foundation Fellow in Kyoto, Japan and in 2004 a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, M.I.T. In 2006 she received a prize from the City of Munich, curated by Bettina Wagner-Bergelt, to develop and exhibit a work using The Travels of Mariko Horo as a realtime stage set for a specially commissioned dance performance to be premiered at the Dance 2006 Festival in Munich.