Ben Fry is the owner and principal of Fathom Information Design, a studio in Boston focused on making complex data more understandable, accessible, and usable. Since 2016, he has also taught at MIT as a lecturer.

Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. After completing his dissertation in 2004, he spent time developing tools for visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. During the 2006-2007 school year, Ben was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design.

He is the author of Visualizing Data (O’Reilly, 2007) and the co-author of Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (MIT Press, 2007) and Getting Started with Processing (O’Reilly, 2010), which describes the project he co-founded in 2001. He spent 22 years building the Processing software and supporting its community, reaching millions of users before he stepped down in 2023.

Ben’s work was part of the Whitney Biennial in 2002 and the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial in 2003 and 2006. Other pieces have appeared in the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography in New York, at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, and in the films Minority Report and The Hulk. His information graphics have also illustrated articles for the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the journal Nature. Ben was selected as one of Fast Company’s 50 Most Influential Designers in America (2011) and as one of Slate’s Top Right (2011). He has given lectures about data, design, and programming on five continents, and traveled to the White House in 2011 to receive the National Design Award for Interaction Design.