Nathalie Lawhead

Nathalie Lawhead is an independent net artist and video game designer residing in Irvine, California.

Career Lawhead's career started in the mid-to-late nineties, with various pieces of net-art and poetry, culminating in the release of Blue Suburbia in 1999, a project created in collaboration with their mother, Milena Lawhead. Their work often existed in a middleground, adopting various elements from trends in circles that used Adobe Flash, whilst still retaining an HTML focus common with many net-artists, eventually having their work described colloquially as 'games' by critics online. Lawhead's other early work has mostly been lost, due to issues with inaccessibility and changing technologies, such as removal of support for Flash.

In 2019, Lawhead accused video game composer Jeremy Soule of rape. No formal charges were filed in connection with the allegations.

MoMA induction Following the release of Lawhead's game Everything is Going to Be OK, the title was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 2022 exhibition Never Alone: Video Games as Interactive Design, an exhibit that included a series of 35 different works spanning the development of video games as an art form, and exploring their validity as works of design art. Lawhead's work was eventually inducted into the museum's permanent collection following the exhibition, making the MoMA the first major artistic institution to include Lawhead's game in their catalogue.

Works Blue Suburbia (1999) - Interactive website, codeveloped with Milena Lawhead A_DESKTOP_LOVE_STORY (2018) Electric File Monitor (2018) – A program that scans a user's computer and makes assessments on their files RUNONCE (remember_me) (2019) – A digital pet game that can only be played once per installation Mackerelmedia Fish (2020) Electric Zine Maker (2021) – Open source zine making tool Blue Suburbia (2024) – A remake of the 1999 work

Awards 2015 - IGF Nuovo Award for Tetrageddon Games 2017 - Indiecade Interaction Award for Everything is Going to Be OK 2017 - A.MAZE Digital Moment Award for Everything is Going to Be OK