Christiane Robbins is a neoteric director, media artist, and scholar whose post-disciplinary practice spans digital media, architectural imaging, experimental video, design, and research. As a founding partner of Metropolitan Architectural Practice (MAP) and Director of its research division, MAP Studio, she has cultivated a body of work that redefines the boundaries of spatial, visual, and cultural production. Her practice interrogates the intersections of material and digital realms, leveraging emerging technologies to foster innovative solutions that are both critically engaged and socially conscious.

Her work engages with the disruptive impact of technology on contemporary urbanism, post-disciplinary design, and visual culture — an ethos that resonates with MAP’s latest project, Thresholds of the Frontier. Created in response to the rapid advancements of generative AI, the project explores “the speed of thought” and the dualities of visual seduction and the unforeseen challenges posed by artificial intelligence and its corollaries. Drawing on concepts akin to those of Jean Baudrillard Delueze & Guttari, Shannon Vallor, and Paul Virilio, Robbins examines the incongruities of machine vision and synthetic cognition, from the macroeconomics of AI to its intimate, everyday implications. Virilio’s position that speed reconfigures time, space, and human experience is central to her work, which visualizes AI’s dromological effects — how the velocity of algorithmic generation disrupts conventions of architectural, visual media and design practices, creating new thresholds for understanding spatiality and the built environment.

Robbins' media and visual arts practice extends across digital video, installation, and digital imaging, encompassing database aesthetics, speculative visualization, and experimental design. Her projects transcend the purely aesthetic, activating discourse across media systems, architecture, and social movements. Her work has been exhibited globally at some of the most seminal cultural and academic institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum, the São Paulo Biennial, the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Seoul, the Gwangju Biennale’s Unnamed Design (co-curated by Seung H-Sang and Ai Weiwei), and Reporting from the Front, the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Alejandro Aravena.  Additional exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art, Sydney, List Gallery, MIT, Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, Wexner Center for Contemporary Art, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Her contributions to experimental media and film have been presented at the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Vigo International Film Festival, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), among others. Her video works have been recognized with multiple awards, including the Best of Category Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and have been broadcast on PBS (KQED, KCET, WGBH, WNET), Channel 4 UK, and cablecast worldwide.

Her work is included in numerous public, private, and corporate collections, such as the Getty Museum, LA; the Kitchen, NY; the Banff Centre for the Arts; the Pacific Film Archives; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MoMA, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Honolulu; the Oakland Museum; the Corning Museum of Glass; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the Stanford University Art Museum; and the California Institute of the Arts.

Robbins' projects extend beyond the traditional realms of media arts and architecture to serve as catalysts for community engagement, social movements, and transcultural understanding. She has worked on a number of collaborative projects, including her work with Marlon Riggs on Color Adjustment (recipient of the 1992 Peabody Award for International Documentary of the Year). She was also co-director of one of the first international cultural projects webcast on the Internet, an acclaimed initiative integrating visual art, installation, performance, and media/technology, positioned as an alternative cultural response to the Sixth International Conference on AIDS. Additionally, she co-directed X-Factor, one of the earliest online groups and conferences addressing the survival and expansion of independent media practices, featuring practitioners such as Steve Anker, Craig Baldwin, Kathy Geritz, David Gerstein, Steve Seid, Jeffrey Skoller, Valerie Soe, Scott Stark, and Jack Walsh.

Robbins began her video work collaborating with Max Almy on the internationally recognized videos Perfect Leader (1983) and Leaving the Twentieth Century (1981/82).  She worked with Bill Viola on his feature-length video I Do Not Know What It Is That I Am and Marlon Riggs on Anthem.

Her curatorial work has been equally expansive, serving as Co-Director of New Langton Arts, directing the NEA’s Regional Regranting Program for Artist Fellowships, acting as Associate Curator for the Art Museum Association of America and organizing symposiums and exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Institute, including Transactions in the Post-Industrial Era and The Voice of Citizenry, which featured notable theorists such as Fran Dyson, Thyrza Goodeve, Avital Ronell, and Sandy Stone and Culture Under Fire, Setting the Agenda for the ‘90s (1990); "Mass Media, Virtual Reality & the Persian Gulf War: A Symposium Investigating Recent Applications & Implications of the Artificial Reality Technology," and "Desire, Power, Technology: The Technologized Body."  These symposia brought together artists, academics, scientists, writers, engineers, and cyber-hackers to consider the practice and theory of technology-based art and the emerging field of virtual reality. A notable exhibition was the Adeline Kent Award for artist David Dashiell.

She also co-organized the USC/MIT bi-annual conference Race in Digital Space with Anna Everett, Henry Jenkins, and Tara McPherson and served as Executive Producer for the AIM Festivals for Time-Based Media held in conjunction with MOCA and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, featuring Issac Julien, DJ Spooky, among a amazing group of artists, critics, historians, and theorists.

A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 1989), Robbins also holds a BS in 20th-Century Art/Art History (specializing in New Genres) and studio practice (photography) from the University of Wisconsin, with postgraduate studies at Harvard University. In the academic sphere, she has held key positions, including Professor at the University of Southern California (USC), where she directed the Matrix Program for Digital Inter-Media Arts, served as a Fellow at Stanford University and an invited member of USC’s Norman Lear Center.  She has been Visiting Faculty at Mills College, San Francisco State University, and UC Berkeley and has lectured extensively worldwide.

Robbins' practice has been recognized with numerous accolades, including the Graham Foundation Grant, Banff Co-Production Fellowship, City of Los Angeles (COLA) Fellowship, SFMoMA SECA Award Video Commission, and the first-place Women in Design International Award. Her projects have been supported by institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Film Arts Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Her curatorial and studio work has been critically reviewed in Artforum, Artsy, Archinect, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Dwell, The Los Angeles Times, i-D Magazine, and Domus.

As a principal of Jetztzeit (the space between 0/1), Robbins engages in a discrete forensic research and algorithmic-based speculative aesthetics, interrogating visual cultures, digital media, and geo-locative installations. Projects such as I-5-Passing (premiered at Edge Conditions, San Jose Museum of Art, curated by Steve Dietz) and the COLA Award-winning Mirage Series reflect her cross-disciplinary approach, merging digital media, architecture, and speculative design.

Robbins operates at the vanguard of new cultural paradigms, where architectural imaging, digital media, and speculative design converge in a recursive formalism mapping our understanding of space, narrative, and interaction. By dissolving disciplinary boundaries, her work challenges us to envision neo-ecological, technologically driven, and profoundly human-centric futures.