John Crawford is an intermedia artist, interactive performance director, projection designer and technology developer. Intersecting software with digital media and theatrical performance, he uses computers and video to create painterly animations and motion graphics for dance, theatre and music. His projects explore embodied interaction, combining processed video and digital animation with motion capture, real-time motion tracking, image processing and telepresence. He originated the Active Space concept in 1994 to describe his intermedia performance systems that produce visuals and music in response to movement.

His work has been performed and exhibited across North America and in Asia, Europe and South America. He is the creator of eDance Network, a series of interactive public art installations, and is directing Threads & Trajectories, a dance film trilogy featuring the Beijing Modern Dance Company. Other recent projects include The Gravity of Revolution, a dance/media performance with CorbinDances in New York, the dance films Anabasi, Tubae Mundi, Galileo: Last Letters, In Search of Eurydice and Voice of the Rings, presented in festivals around the world; the telepresence networked performances Jazz Telemotions, Latent Potentials, Songs at a Distance and Ootoo; and Urban Fabric, a series of dance/media performances in Beijing, Paris, Prague and California.

He is Associate Professor of Dance and Media Arts at University of California Irvine, where he directs the Embodied Media + Performance Technology Lab and the campus-wide Digital Arts Minor program. His course offerings include dance filmmaking, telepresence & interactive performance, motion capture, and digital media art fundamentals. He founded the eMedia Studio, a distributed arts collaboratory at Calit2, the multi-campus California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, where he is a frequent participant in transdisciplinary research projects connecting performing arts and digital media practices with engineering and computer science.

In 2006-08 he was a Visiting Research Professor at Beijing Dance Academy, China’s foremost dance university, and currently he is Director of Media Arts at the annual summer International Contemporary Arts Festival in Andalusia, Spain. As a software developer, his credits include projects for Adobe, Microsoft and other companies. As a software developer, his credits include projects for Adobe, Microsoft and other companies. As a theatre director and actor, he studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.