Claudia Miranda
Claudia Miranda is an artist, designer, and educator who has spent her life translating between cultures, between languages, between the logic of systems and the instinct of the body. Born in Mexico and raised in the United States, that practice of translation is the engine of her work.
Her art begins with what resists easy telling: hand-sculpted clay, handwritten journals, a dental record, the recurring figures of an inner life. She brings these materials into immersive digital environments, glass labyrinths, cloned voices, AI that misreads her own handwriting, not to resolve the tension between human and machine, but to make it felt. Her work doesn't persuade. It invites you to stay inside a question.
Over a decade of immersive practice spanning VR, AR, and interactive installation, her most recent work is Sightrance (2026), a first-person interactive installation exhibited at Gray Area San Francisco, in which photogrammetry-scanned clay figures populate a dreamlike glass labyrinth. The piece features a split audio track: an AI voice and Miranda's own voice reading the same machine-generated text simultaneously, the text itself produced from an AI's failed attempt to transcribe her handwritten journals.
As a designer, Miranda has built spatial computing and mixed reality experiences for the New York Times R&D lab, Delta Airlines (Apple Vision Pro, launched CES 2025), and Google. As an educator, she has taught at Stanford d.school and Gray Area, where she is also an alumna and exhibiting artist. She has spoken at A MAZE. Festival in Berlin, holds a Mozilla XR Studio fellowship, and has been in residence at SFMOMA.
She trusts what the work knows before she does.
I make work that begins with a feeling I can't yet name.
Growing up as an immigrant in the late 1990s, my computer was my window into the world. It was where I learned, where I connected, where I tried on different versions of myself through online profiles and mediated identities. That early relationship with digital space as both refuge and performance has never fully left the work.
My practice moves between design, immersive installation, and material making. In my client work I solve problems inside constraints. In my art I follow instinct until I understand what I was looking for. These two modes are not opposites. The tension between them is where the work lives.
I am interested in what digital environments cannot fully process: the intimacy of a handwritten page, the weight of a hand-sculpted figure, the body as archive of what it lived through and what it was denied. I bring these materials into real-time 3D environments not to translate them cleanly but to watch what happens when they resist. When an AI fails to transcribe my handwriting and produces something stranger and truer than the original, that failure is the work.
A traditional artist once asked me, during an open studio, how I know when a piece is done. My answer at the time was that I aim for a specific mood and keep working until I land in it. I didn't have language yet for what that mood was. Making the work taught me. The pieces that matter to me are finished when they create the particular sensation of discomfort and relief I feel when I am emotionally overwhelmed — the feeling of surrendering to something larger than what I can control.
That is what I am always making: a place to surrender. A space that holds more than it explains.