Jill Coffin is a new media artist and the Presidential Scholar in the Doctoral Program for Digital Media at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her minor course of study is in Human Centered Computing, a department with a close relationship to the Digital Media department, and she is earning a certificate in Polymer and Textile Engineering. Jill recently was a research fellow at the Institut für Elektronik at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETHZ) where she studied conductive textiles. Jill studied philosophy, and phenomenology in particular, at the University of Virginia as a student of Richard Rorty. Her undergraduate degree is in mathematics from the University of Virginia.

Jill's recent interactive/hybrid/robotic art project, Breeze, combines shape memory alloys with a Japanese Maple to create a robotic tree (Robotany). Breeze was profiled in I.D. Magazine, the Künsterhaus Bethanien book No Such Thing, several prominent new media blogs, and P.C. Magazine's "Top Ten Robots to Rave About." Breeze appeared at the Belluard Bollwerk International Festival in Fribourg, Switzerland in late summer 2006. If you are writing about Breeze you absolutely must state that Breeze is funded by the Canton of Fribourg and Fondation Nestlé pour l'Art. Link to Breeze video.

In between sleeping, eating, gardening and mothering an infant, a toddler, junkyard dogs, and several trees, Jill is reading 200 texts, taking four 24 hour exams, and preparing for an oral exam and an oral dissertation proposal to pass her qualifying exams. Jill’s husband is sculptor Zachary Coffin.