Nick Montfort serves the arts and higher education in leadership roles, is an artist using computation as a medium, researches digital art and media, and is an educator. He is professor of digital media at MIT and principal investigator in the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, Norway. His lab/studio, the Trope Tank, has locations in New York City and at MIT. He researches creative computing and seeks to enable learning in many ways, also working as an event organizer, curator, editor, and publisher. He lives in New York City with his spouse, Flourish Klink, and their daughter.
Montfort earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania, a masters in creative writing (poetry) from Boston University, a masters in media arts and sciences from MIT, and undergraduate degrees in both liberal arts and computer science.
Leadership in higher education and the arts. Montfort chaired MIT’s Institute-wide Committee on the Library System, served as his department’s associate head and undergraduate officer, and was on MIT’s Future of the Arts committee. He founded and was lead organizer of the digital art festival Synchrony (a demoparty); it ran for five years and in New York City and Montreal. Exhibits he has curated include the online Generative Unfoldings (for MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology). He was president of the Electronic Literature Organization and was on its board of directors for more than ten years. He edits the Using Electricity series of literary computer-generated books for Counterpath. He and Mary Flanagan edit the MIT Press Hardcopy series, publishing computational art projects in print. Montfort is part of the founding and leadership group for the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Center of Excellence. He founded and directs the Trope Tank, his DIY research lab/studio, which undertakes scholarly and artistic work. Dozens of artist/researchers accomplished individual and collaborative projects there, including international visiting faculty, Fulbright scholars, and a Grammy Award winning rapper.
Artistic and literary practice. Montfort works in several different contexts, including the Web, book publication, and literary readings — but also gallery exhibition, the demoscene, and livecoding. He translates computational projects, collaborates across languages, and has had his own work translated into half a dozen languages. Of his ten computer-generated literary books, beginning with #! (Counterpath, 2014), his latest is the French/English Rubrique Technologie / Tech Section (with Patsy Baudoin, RRose Editions, 2026), one manifestation of a project also presented as an installation, in Paris, at Jeu de Paume. His and Albert Figurt’s short film Start Me Up, a desktop narrative, premiered in 2025 and has recently been presented (with Arabic voice acting) in Morocco. Montfort has developed about a hundred computational art projects onf many different sizes; one of these, “Taroko Gorge,” has been the basis for literary artworks by students, writers, and artists. In the heyday of blogging, he co-founded the group blog Grand Text Auto. He has programmed and written interactive fiction (e.g., Ad Verbum). He his collaborations include Sea and Spar Between (with Stephanie Strickland), The Deletionist (with Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul), and The Altering Shores Cycle (with Roderick Coover and Adam Vidiksis).
Research and scholarship. Montfort studies computation, material histories, and their intersections and creative potentials. He and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram recently (2024) published an MIT Press anthology, Output, of 70 years of computer-generated text, documenting innovative experiments and foundational work that precede Generative AI. Montfort also co-edited The New Media Reader (with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2003); Lev Manovich called it “the first example of a radically new history of modern culture.” His other MIT Press books include the first study of a specific electronic literature form (Twisty Little Passages, 2003), a 10-author book he organized that was the first in critical code studies (“10 PRINT,” 2013), and a study of the first successful video game console (Racing the Beam, with Ian Bogost, 2009). The last of these led to the long-running MIT Press Platform Studies series. His current Narrative Nubs project to better understand the history of story generation is a collaboration between MIT and Norway’s Center for Digital Narrative. In 2017 MIT Press published The Future, his book about collaborative imagining and making of our future through digital media, writing, and other means.
Teaching and learning. Beyond classroom teaching, curriculum development, and producing digital learning resources, Montfort leads workshops internationally and has taught at SFPC (School for Poetic Computation), SOSA (Society of Spoken Art), and the Banff Centre in Canada. His textbook Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities presents programming as a method of culturally engaged inquiry and creativity. The second edition (MIT Press, 2021) is in print and freely available as an open access book.
- Main page of nickm.com
- Montfort’s curriculum vitae
- A summary of the bio above in less than 100 words
- nicc.mkcin@mkom ◊ @nickmofo@mastodon.social
- Computational Poetry ◊ Post Position (blog)
- Nomnym (naming company) ◊ Synchrony (demoparty, 2016–2020)
- Curveship ◊ Other IF Resources ◊ Miscellaneous
Short Bio
Nick Montfort is a computational literary artist, professor of digital media at MIT, and principal investigator in the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, Norway. He founded and runs a lab/studio, the Trope Tank. His about 100 creative productions include “Taroko Gorge,” which is often studied and modified. He has also collaborated on many textual and cinematic computational art projects. His books include The Future, Twisty Little Passages, and co-edited collections Output and The New Media Reader. He lives in New York City.