JoAnn Kuchera-Morin

Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a Professor in both the Department of Music and Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She serves as the Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATe), established in 1986, and led the Digital Media Innovation Program as its Chief Scientist from 1998-2003. Her research focuses on multi-modal media systems, facility design, and the intersection of art and science through immersive technologies like the Allosphere Research Laboratory—a three-story interactive sphere for multidimensional data exploration.

Education: Ph.D. in Music from the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester, 1984). Her compositional work emphasizes electro-acoustic music, with performances across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. She pioneered natural performance gesture interfaces for digital media control and developed the Allosphere as a cornerstone of UCSB's California Nanosystems Institute.

Key contributions include the Digital Media Innovation Program (multi-million dollar research initiative) and the Allosphere lab, which enables collaborative scientific and artistic investigations. Her work bridges computational media, artistic expression, and interdisciplinary research infrastructure.