Monica Rizzolli

Monica Rizzolli is a Brazilian artist who writes software that grows plants and landscapes. She calls the idea digital morphogenesis: rules that imitate how living things form and change. Born in São Carlos, she now lives and works in Portugal.

Her grandfather ran a print shop in São Paulo, and she made woodcuts and lithographs as a teenager before studying art at UNESP. In 2012, as a student at the Kunsthochschule Kassel in Germany, she stopped painting and taught herself to code in Processing. A MAK Schindler Scholarship took her to the MAK Center in Los Angeles, where she showed a self-generating computer simulation in 2015. In Brazil she cofounded the Noite de Processing meetups at Garoa Hacker Clube and drew the typeface Tomorrow with Tony de Marco.

Fragments of an Infinite Field came out on Art Blocks Curated on 13 September 2021 and sold out in under an hour. Each of its 1,024 outputs is a patch of foliage from one invented plant species, and a season sets the colors and the weather: rain in summer, snow in winter, falling petals in autumn, pollen in spring.

LACMA holds Fragments of an Infinite Field #972, which its collector called Midnight Dance, and #800, along with Tibouchina mutabilis, death from her Tropical Garden series, all promised gifts of The Cozomo de' Medici Collection. For LACMA and Cactoid Labs she made A Tour of Hypothetical Waterfalls (2023), a generative series drawn from Hokusai's waterfall prints in the museum's collection. In 2025 she published the first issue of Variável, a magazine on Brazilian digital art and culture that she edits in Portuguese and English.