Ben Fry

Ben Fry studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Training under John Maeda is recorded. Employment is recorded with Carnegie Mellon University. Work by Ben Fry is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago and Whitney Museum of American Art.

• Name — Benjamin Fry • Born — 1975 • Birthplace — Ann Arbor, Michigan • Occupation — Designer

Fry was born in 1975 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Fry received a Bachelor of Arts (BFA) in communication design, minor in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received Master's degree and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees from the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab, under the direction of John Maeda. His doctoral dissertation, "Computational Information Design" introduces the seven stages of visualizing data: acquiring, parsing, filtering, mining, representing, refining and interacting.

During his time at MIT Media Lab, Fry co-developed Processing, a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the basics of computer programming in a visual context. It is free and open-source software. The Processing design environment developed together with Casey Reas won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. During 2006–2007, Fry was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. He is a principal of Fathom, a design and software consultancy in Boston, Massachusetts. Fry's artwork has been featured in the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial (2003, 2006) and the Whitney Biennial (2002), and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2001, 2008), Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria (2000, 2002, 2005) and in the films Minority Report and The Hulk. He is the winner of the 2011 National Design Award in category "Interaction Design".