"Christine Marie is an inventor of analog that intentionally uses the dispersion of shadow to speak silent poems. She makes color that the fortuitous eye absorbs into the body as emotion. ​ She has the audacity to disrupt light, and to weave a timelessness into its shaped absence, to wordlessly make a story of ambition and migration out of negative space."
​Program notes from the premiere of 4 TRAINS at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Christine Marie is an interdisciplinary media artist who creates artworks, installations, performances, XR experiences, and immersive cinematic spectacles.
Working at the intersection of art and science, Marie is deeply connected to ancient forms and the metaphysical exploration of light. She has pioneered live, large-scale 3D stereo imagery for performance by reinventing the shadow stereoscope—a device that projects the largest known real-time 40-foot 3D images into cubic space. She coined the term (antiquated) Augmented Reality to describe this analog anaglyph effect, comparable to modern-day AR and can only be experienced live or through a VR headset.
Marie seamlessly integrates performers, objects, and special effects to evoke connections with concepts, phenomenology, and history, crafting emotionally and visually compelling hybrid-media experiences. Her work reflects on industrialization, oppositional forces, and the media’s gaze, weaving sensory narratives that explore the role of the feminine in maintaining integrity, beauty, and the preservation of the natural world.
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Her original work has appeared at the Sundance Film Festival New Frontier, REDCAT, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, TED, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, The Exploratorium, Pop-Up Magazine, Z Space, the NY International Fringe Festival, and Soho House. Theatrical designs at the Geffen Playhouse and Southcoast Repertory. With support from the MAP Fund, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Paul Dresher Ensemble Artists Residency, Intersection for the Arts, Cal Arts Center for New Performance, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, The Jim Henson Foundation, and others.
Christine Marie received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Integrated Media, and Theater. She is the recipient of the 2020 CalArts Alumni Council grant. Marie studied Wayang Kulit in Bali with dalang Pak Nartha. She is a former member ShadowLight Productions. Christine Marie is a TED Fellow. In Engaging The Unknown, she discusses her artistic process, and tells the story of discovering cinematic shadow theater while working as a video editor.
Select collaborations and consultations include: Monkey Man 360 VR, a video project with the avant-garde art collective The Residents and Stéphane Blanquet. Shadow animation co-design and choreography for The Last Mortal, a multimedia performance exploring transhumanism, in collaboration with the award-winning German company Half Past Selber Schuld. Working with artist Jordan Wolfson to teach a robot to create hand-shadow puppets. Mask design and fabrication for Skinny Puppy's Mythmaker tour.
As an educator, Marie was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Arts and Technology Professor of Practice grant for her work at Occidental College. She has taught shadow animation at Pixar University and DreamWorks Studios and has lectured at CalArts and Stanford University. Additionally, she has led professional development workshops at Crystal Bridges (in conjunction with the University of Arkansas), the Skirball Cultural Center, Columbia Teachers College, and other institutions. Twice certified in Aesthetic Education by the Lincoln Center Institute, she was commissioned by LACMA during the pandemic to create Light Story for their education program. She is currently a teaching professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo.
Her latest project is inspired by Rachel Carson's final book, The Sense of Wonder.
