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Rhonda Holberton

She //Her // Hers
They // Them // Theirs

New Media Artist

San Jose, California

A woman with long light brown hair and black glasses, wearing a black jacket, stands in an urban setting.

Rhonda Holberton utilizes technology as a medium to reconcile the biological body with geologic time, revealing their material and environmental impacts both on individual entities and on a planetary scale. Holberton's subtle animations, digital interventions, sculptures, and installation pieces move between the material and the immaterial, the authentic and synthetic, and pay special attention to the phenomenology of climate change in order to imagine ways we might collectively write more inclusive rules for digital platforms. She has exhibited widely, including at CULT Aimee Friberg (San Francisco), RMIT Gallery (Melbourne), La Becque | Résidences d’artistes (La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland), FIFI Projects (Mexico City), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), The Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. She has been awarded a Simons Foundation Triangle Program Grant, the Fondation Ténot Fellowship in Paris, NEA Grant for Arts Projects, among others. Holberton’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney, SFMOMA, and the McEvoy Family Collection, as well as various private collections. Holberton holds a MFA from Stanford University and is currently Associate Professor of Digital Media at San José State University.

This artist page was last updated on: 04.08.2026

This video is a result of the recorded brainwave activity of a diverse group of participants as they engaged with a range of scents, reflecting on personal memories and speculative futures. The visual quality of the video showcases a colorful amalgamation of textures and hues. Additionally a small round resin and bronze sculpture accompanies the video.

Other Known Tomorrows by Rhonda Holberton, 2025. Single-channel digital video animation, resin and bronze sculpture, fragrance. 9 minutes.

Video stills courtesy of the artist.

This video features a 3D animation of a body formed from a  deconstructed digital skin, visually resembling paper mache or canvas, slowly and methodically performing a Vinyasa Yoga Sequence.

The Italian Navigator Has Landed In The New World by Rhonda Holberton, 2014. Single-channel digital video. 12:11 minutes.

Video still courtesy of the artist.

Visually, this installation consists of six mats and cushions spread around a monitor, with VR headsets placed at each mat. Periodically throughout the course of the exhibition, a Reiki practitioner performs alignments over the server to refresh the signal. Once updated, the energy is sent back out onto the network using a php script to ping all the IP addresses of visitors to the site. In addition to visiting the website hosted inside the sculpture, viewers can entangle themselves in the installation through a VR display that shows motion-capture data of the Reiki service. The sculpture and exhibition environment are recreated in the VR view.

Again for the First Time by Rhonda Holberton, 2018. VR headsets, locally hosted website and router, sculptural Installation with silicon, yoga mats, and flatscreen TV.

Images courtesy of the artist.