Allison Kudla was born in the second month of 1980, her mother a preschool teacher, her father a college professor. At an early age she became interested in colorful floating patterns she saw in her room at night when she tried to sleep. She often restlessly approached her parents, until one night when she remembers her father calming her down by explaining that she sees these colors because of the cones in her eyes adjusting to the darkness. She had little idea what this meant, but somehow she felt closer to understanding why she was seeing something that she couldn't catch in a jar and show to someone else, although that did not stop her from trying...
After rigorously pursuing painting and drawing in high school, she applied to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for her first degree program. She was accepted with an academic scholarship. At SAIC, she took painting courses for her first two years. In a pivotal semester, she took both a class called "digital tools for painting" and "conceptual painting". At this time she very seriously asked herself why she was making art. She saw her art objects as ultimately too material and separated from reality, and wanted to make more of an impact on her society. She immediately latched on to technology, seeing it as evolutionary and culturally impacting.
She shifted her study to art & technology and finished her BFA in 2002. From there she began a PhD at the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS). After completing her general exam she took leave from the program at UW and moved to Bangalore, India. She is currently living and working there as a visiting artist-in-residence and faculty member at Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, where she is working in their Center for Experiment Media Arts (CEMA).
In her work she is interested in using digital media to preserve and discover environments that are in a continual state of flux. She also uses technology in her art to gain greater perspectives on the system in which she exists, with the vision of generating deeply impacting and fully present systemic realities. She hopes for her work to inspire, develop and question the technology it uses, with the pursuit of utilizing art to create meaningful and present experiences that allow us to understand our selves and our habitats in ways no others forms of human inquiry and development could. In her earlier work, she focused on the variation of interiors by producing real-time video/audio renderings using data sensed within the given space. Her more recent work uses data sensed from natural systems to create hybrid bio-mechanical systems. Currently she has been exploring CNC technologies and plant tissue culturing in her time-based botanical works.