Russell Pensyl (MFA 88, BFA 85) is an American media artist and designer. Pensyl focuses on experience and design processes, narrative strategies, interaction in media installations and experiences. Pensyl’s current work includes the facial recognition, emotion detection, positioning, localization and gesture recognition in the creation of location-based entertainment and installation artworks. Pensyl has been included in international exhibitions, such as the SIGGRAPH Curated Art Gallery in USA, Second International Art and Science Exhibition in Beijing China, the Sarajevo Winter Festival in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the SIGGRAPH Asia Synthesis Curated Art Gallery in Singapore, the Boston Cyber Arts Gallery, the Toronto Fringe Theatre Festival, the 2004 Shanghai Biennial, the Machida Museum of Art in Tokyo, Japan and many others.

Pensyl is a noted pioneer in ground-breaking mixed reality, credited with one of the first use of mixed reality in theatrical stage performances. He directed and produces the mixed reality theatre performance, The Ultimate Commodity Pensyl participated in some of the earliest interactive media experiences as early as 1983. Pensyl owned and operated two successful commercial enterprises in digital media from 1988 until 2003, designing and creating films and interactive media for Fortune 500 companies such as Apple, IBM, Motorola, Kodak, Adobe, Sony, Disney, Prentice Hall, Pearson Education, JCPenney, WebTV, 3Com, PalmPilot, American Airlines, Lucent Technologies and others.