About
“Semi Ryu is an associate professor, Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and BFA from the Korean National University of Arts, and currently a Doctoral candidate at Planetary Collegium, CAIIA-hub, Plymouth, UK, exploring Virtual puppetry informed by Korean shamanism. Her works started from experimental 3D animations, with the subject of interactivity in Korean shaman ritual and oral tradition of storytelling. Her animations have been widely presented in more than 15 countries, such as “Annecy Animation festival, France”, “Transmediale, Germany”, “Netmage, Italy”, “Videobrasil, Brasil”, “ISEA 2002, Japan”, “SIGGRAPH 99 & 2OO1”, and recently featured on StreamingMuseum.org, organized by Chelsea Art Museum, NYC. Her animation won numerous awards, including “The Best Young Animated Film Award” at 11th International Festival of Animated Film, Stuttgart, Germany, which is the second largest event of its kind. Her interest about interactivity has been continued to her critical view of interactive media and virtual interactive puppet performance, presented internationally in Vancouver, Zurich, Amsterdam, Milan, Beijing, Montreal, Madrid, Berlin and more. Her talks and papers have been frequently invited from international conferences and publications. One of her papers “Ritualizing Interactive Media” was mentioned as exceptional quality in Leonardo review (MIT press), 2005 and published in Technoetic Arts 3.2, Bristol, UK. Since 2004, she has been collaborated with Multimedia lab, University of Rome, Italy, for her ongoing virtual puppetry projects. Her recent collaboration is “Experimental Virtual Wayang” project, combining Virtual and traditional shadow puppetry together, performed by Gusti Sudarta, a shadow puppet master from Bali. Next Virtual Puppetry will be performed at Chelsea Art Museum, NYC, May 27, 2009.”