Kit Fitzgerald

Biography

Combining what she termed the "cool, electronic art of video and the warmer, naturalist arts of painting and music," Kit Fitzgerald created gestural works that suggest vibrant moving canvases. Working with the Fairlight Computer Video Instrument (CVI), Fitzgerald generated and orchestrated imagery in real time, creating vivid compositions of color, form, light, time, and sound that unfold by the artist's hand. Starting in 1985, she applied this technique of improvisational "video painting" to live music/video performances with musicians, including Peter Gordon, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Max Roach.

Fitzgerald trained as a painter, and her video drawings, with their lush palettes and rich textures made kinetic by electronic manipulation, display an evocative visual sensibility. Modelling her pictorial aesthetic on musical composition, she builds visual rhythm through theme and variations. Her tactile manipulation of the medium — the physicality of the gesture — results in what she termed "technology with a humanness."

Prior to her work with the Fairlight CVI, Fitzgerald won acclaim for her innovative body of video works produced in collaboration with John Sanborn.

Fitzgerald was the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Program. She was artist-in-residence at the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen from 1977 to 1982, and had been a member of the Directors Guild of America since 1980. She was a 1989 Fellow of the American Film Institute Directing Workshop for Women. Fitzgerald's work has been broadcast around the world, and exhibited at festivals and institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Gallery Watari, Tokyo; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Bonn Videonale; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Fitzgerald lived and worked in New York, until her death in 2026.