Michael J. Masucci
Michael J. Masucci is a Digital Artist and Curator, Director of the EZTV Online Museum, Co-Chair of DNA Festival Santa Monica, and Cofounder of holoSTAGE, with more than four decades of experience at the intersection of art and emerging technology. He is a founding member of EZTV, the pioneering Los Angeles video art group and alternative theater/gallery space whose roots date back to 1979, and Cofounder of CyberSpace Gallery, one of the world’s first art galleries dedicated to digital art — a gallery the Victoria and Albert Museum credits with having “literally put digital art on the map.”
Since 2021, Michael has served on the Advisory Board of the Center for Applied Values and Ethics in Advancing Technologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
EZTV began in 1979, when founder John Dorr started screening feature-length work shot on consumer video equipment in West Hollywood, pioneering what is now known as the microcinema. In 1983, Dorr, Michael, and more than two dozen cofounding members pooled their resources to open a permanent space, the EZTV Video Gallery, which the American Film Institute described as the first independent gallery dedicated entirely to video.
Michael has led EZTV since Dorr’s death in 1993, encouraged by Dr. Timothy Leary, a patron, collaborator, and friend with whom he staged the live multimedia performance series How to Operate Your Brain. Today he directs the EZTV Online Museum, the permanent online archive of EZTV, and its related organization CyberSpace Gallery. Read his NFT Magazine Cover Artist interview and EZTV and LA’s Digital Underground.
Michael’s commitment to digital art deepened through his collaboration with computer art historian Patric D. Prince, whose archives now anchor the Victoria and Albert Museum’s computer art collection. In 1990, Prince curated the pivotal group exhibition ART 1990 at EZTV in collaboration with LA ACM SIGGRAPH, and in 1992, the two cofounded CyberSpace Gallery in West Hollywood. When its physical space closed, the gallery went virtual, becoming one of the first online galleries to showcase digital art. Prince’s papers, donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2008, remain a central resource for the history of early computer art.
In 2011, Michael’s early video work Standing Waves was included in the Getty’s 60-venue initiative Pacific Standard Time, for which he also organized Hacking the Timeline v2.0, a five-part series of live events, screenings, and panel discussions.
That recognition led the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries to acquire and digitize a substantial portion of the EZTV archive, including a seminal collection of early Queer media art that Michael helped preserve. In 2019, for EZTV’s 40th anniversary, scholars working with the Kandinsky Library at the Centre Pompidou presented works and archival materials from EZTV in Paris.
In 2024, marking EZTV’s 45th anniversary and 40 years of collaboration with LA ACM SIGGRAPH, Michael co-created DNA Festival Santa Monica (Digital New Arts Festival), a year-long survey of classic and contemporary digital art spanning more than two dozen events across nine venues in Santa Monica’s Cultural Corridor, staged concurrently with the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative. He has served as the festival’s Co-Chair since 2023. Through his holoSTAGE initiative, Michael now brings artists, choreographers, and scientists together to develop large-scale volumetric imaging — life-sized, AI-enhanced holographic projections interacting with live performers — in collaboration with the first holographic theater in academia at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s iEXCEL center.
After earning a professional certificate in cryptocurrency from MIT, Michael released his first NFT, Standing Waves #1, a 1982 8-bit hybrid digital generative/video realtime animation, and in February 2026, he was featured as the Cover Artist of NFT Magazine. He writes and speaks on how blockchain, decentralized distribution, and AI are reshaping the economics and historiography of art.
Michael’s productions earned a Cine Golden Eagle for the public service announcement Art Makes Us Human, created with California Lawyers for the Arts, and he was twice named to AV Video and Multimedia Producer magazine’s Top 100 Producers list. Projects on which he was a principal collaborator have received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. He served as Associate Producer and Film Editor of Luck, Trust & Ketchup, the critically acclaimed documentary about filmmaker Robert Altman that aired on the BBC and Bravo.
Throughout the 1980s, he performed in the media/performance art duo Vertical Blanking, and his collaborations have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Lincoln Center, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the American Film Institute, PBS, and REDCAT. His guerrilla artwork the West Hollywood Sign, a 40-foot plywood installation erected without permission on the 30th anniversary of the invention of videotape, became an enduring symbol of civic pride.
Michael taught Digital Media at Otis College of Art and Design and has guest lectured at Caltech, UCLA, USC, the University of Helsinki, the Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, the American Film Institute, and Changchun Film Studios in China, as well as at conferences including SIGGRAPH, Digital Hollywood, DV Expo, and Internet World. A frequent voice on art, technology, and the future of humanity, he has spoken at Humanity+ events at Caltech and beyond. Watch Mediating the Transition and History Is the Art of Forgetting.
He has also debated media, security, and artificial intelligence alongside security experts such as Winn Schwartau. Watch Hackers, the Media, Truth, Trust & Alternative Facts from Hack in Paris 2017, To Serve Man AI, Machine Learning & Deep Learning in Security from Hack in Paris 2018, and Brain Bursts of Arts and Sciences – Humanity Plus Post-Pandemic Summit.
From 2013 to 2025, Michael served on the Santa Monica Arts Commission, where his roles included Chair, Vice Chair, Chair of the Media Arts Subcommittee, and Chair of the Bergamot Station Arts Center Ad Hoc Committee. He has also served on the Board of Directors of the Santa Monica Arts Foundation and on the Santa Monica Public Art Committee. EZTV made its home for 26 years at the 18th Street Arts Center, the longest-running artist residency center in Southern California. A trained mediator, Michael is a member of the Southern California Mediation Association.
Michael earned his J.D. from California School of Law in 2011 and a Graduate Certificate in Dispute Resolution & Mediation from California State University, Northridge. He also holds professional certificates in Music Production from Berklee College of Music, Graphic Design from the California Institute of the Arts, Mediation and Conflict Resolution from Cornell University, Entrepreneurship from The Wharton School, and Film Production from UCLA, and he is working toward a Master’s degree in Museum Studies at Harvard Extension School.
His earliest professional career, in the New York photographic industry of the mid-to-late 1970s, included work as a photo-muralist at Modernage Photographics, where he printed mural versions of Richard Avedon’s photographs for museum-level projects.
Watch Michael J. Masucci, Pioneer in Video Art, Digital Media. Read his Contributions on Medium.
Visit his LinkedIn profile, his EZTV Museum page, his LA ACM SIGGRAPH page, and his Right Click Save profile. Follow him on Facebook and X.