Charles Csuri

Csuri is in the Football Hall of Fame as M.V.P. in the Big Ten Conference and captain of the Ohio State University's first national championship football team in 1942. He was a 16th round selection (154th overall pick) in the 1944 NFL Draft by the Chicago Cardinals.

Csuri served in the US Army from 1943-1946, during World War II. In 1945 Csuri received the Bronze Star for heroism in the Battle of the Bulge.

After World War II, Csuri returned to the Ohio State University to complete his M.A. in art in 1948. In 1949, he joined the faculty of the Department of Art at the university.[1] In 1978, he became a Professor of Art Education and in 1986 a Professor of Computer Information Science. He is still a professor Emeritus at the Ohio State Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design (ACCAD), which he founded.[2]

Csuri became best known for pioneering the field of computer graphics, computer animation and digital fine art, creating his first computer art in 1964.[3] He was described by the Smithsonian as the "father of digital art and computer animation", and as a leading pioneer of computer animation by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH). Between 1971 and 1987, while a senior professor at Ohio State University, Csuri founded the Computer Graphics Research Group, the Ohio Super Computer Graphics Project, and the Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design, dedicated to the development of digital art and computer animation. Csuri was co-founder of Cranston/Csuri Productions (CCP), one of the world's first computer animation production companies.[1] In 2000 Csuri received both the 2000 Governor's Award for the Arts for the best individual artist,[4] and Ohio State's Sullivant Award, the institution's highest honor, in acknowledgement of his lifetime achievements in the fields of digital art and computer animation.[4] His 2010 exhibit "Beyond Boundaries" was a retrospective of seventy of his works of computer art. The exhibition traveled to museums in Europe and Asia. He was also the founder of Ohio State's research center, the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD).

Notable works by Csuri are: Wondrous Spring (1992), Random War (1967) and Random War Pics (2013), Spinning (1994), A Happy Time (1996), Doddle (2016), Old Age (2016), Despair (2016), and ribFIG (2016).