Biography

Zachary Richter (b. 1984, Chicago) is a Los Angeles–based artist, designer, and creative director whose work moves between visual storytelling, immersive technology, and symbolic image-making. A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (2007), his practice spans painting, photography, virtual reality, and interactive media.

His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen, the Watari-Um Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and the Phi Centre in Montréal. His projects have also premiered at major festivals including Cannes, Sundance, Tribeca, and SXSW.

Richter’s notable works include Hallelujah, a VR adaptation of Leonard Cohen’s iconic song, and Walking New York, The New York Times’ first VR film, created with JR and Chris Milk, which contributed to the Times’ Cannes Grand Prix. He was the creative director of Sound and Vision, an interactive music experience for Beck which won a Cannes Gold Lion.

As creative director at Within, Richter helped develop Supernatural, a VR fitness platform named one of TIME Magazine’s "Best Inventions of 2020."

Richter’s current practice turns inward, guided by what emerges unannounced: fragments of image, memory, and thought that rise quietly and ask to be noticed. In collecting and shaping them, he looks for the meaning they carry.

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Artist Statement

I make work to keep a record. Images, fragments, and messages surface from memory, from the static state between waking and sleep, and from moments that linger for reasons I may never fully understand. Some arrive through dreams, others through observation. What matters to me is that they persist.

My work isn’t about telling stories so much as assembling a personal mythology. I map out what remains, what recurs, and what never quite resolves. Each painting, photograph, or piece of writing is treated as an artifact: something unearthed and arranged, a way to see what endures when I pay close attention.

There’s a gravity to the fragments that break through. They don’t arrive at random; they surface when my mind is quiet or when I find myself most receptive. I try to honor these messages and moments by giving them form, letting them become tangible, giving them space to gather meaning.

Ultimately, I’m making space for what is fleeting. The work is not a search for final answers. It is a way to live with the questions and make something real out of what drifts through. I build out of wandering, out of noticing what remains after meaning has shifted, and out of trust that even what’s unresolved has a place.

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Photo by Kathy Ryan for The New York Times