Antonio Muntadas

Antoni Muntadas was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1942. He studied at the University of Barcelona from 1959 to 1962 and industrial engineering at the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona, Spain, from 1963 to 1967, graduating with a master's degree. In 1971, he moved to New York. From 1977 to 1984, Muntadas was a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, where he held a professorship from 1990 to 2014. Muntadas has accepted other teaching positions in Europe and the United States, including at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, the art schools in Bordeaux and Grenoble, the University of California (UCLA) in San Diego, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Cooper Union in New York, the Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (CAFA), Tokyo University of the Arts, the University of São Paulo, and the University of Buenos Aires.
Muntadas has received several grants and awards, including a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Arts Electronica in Linz, the Laser d'Or in Locarno, the Premi Nacional d'Arts Plàstiques from the Catalan government, the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 2005, and the Premio Velázquez de las Artes Plásticas from the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 2009.
He presented solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, the Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, the Musée Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Museu d'Art Contemporani in Barcelona. He participated in major international exhibitions and group shows, including the 6th and X. Edition of documenta Kassel (1977, 1997), the Whitney Biennial of American Art (1991), the 42nd (1980) and 51st Venice Biennale (2005), as well as the biennials in São Paulo, Lyon, Taipei, Gwangju, Havana and Istanbul. Antoni Muntadas lives and works in New York.

Through his interest in painting, Muntadas found his way to multimedia art, of which he is one of the most important international representatives. The artist works across media with video, photography and installation and uses radio and the Internet to address political and social issues. In 1994, for example, he realized The File Room, one of the first Internet artworks - an open database on the Net that archives censorship cases.