Nicole Ruggiero is a 3D artist, animator and creative director whose work merges digital and physical realms to explore personal and interpersonal dynamics in a post-internet society. After graduating with a degree in graphic design from the University of Florida in 2014, she worked as a designer at Viacom before teaching herself 3D software and moving into full-time freelance and art practice in 2017.,
She began exhibiting internationally in 2017 with Slide to Expose, made with Molly Soda and the studio Refrakt, which used a custom augmented reality app to overlay everyday bedroom objects with private digital messages, exploring intimacy, privacy and the interplay of life and death online. The installation won the Lumen Prize's Founder's Award in 2017 and was shown internationally, including at Today Art Museum in Beijing and Kunsthalle Mainz in Germany.,
Between 2018 and 2021 she made How The Internet Changed My Life, a documentary exhibition pairing CGI-composited portraits of six people with a VR world, an AR filter, or a retro website built around each person's relationship to the internet, developed with collaborators The Glad Scientist and Dylan Banks. It showed at HEK Basel during Art Basel and at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2021, then as a solo exhibition at 11 Newel Gallery in Brooklyn in 2022, where its NFT editions were released on OpenSea.
In How long will you love me? (2021), shown in Christie's Dubai group exhibition “Block Party” in 2022,a figure casts away artifacts of her digital life amid chaotic, kinetic motion.Ruggiero has said the piece followed the deaths of close family members and, soon after, her cat of ten years, describing it as “an emotional exploration of personal vulnerability”.In 2026 she extended that theme with Messages to Heaven, made with programmer Bjorn Stange, an installation in which three vintage Nokia phones send text messages to deceased relatives, which she said would let her “remember and communicate with them”.
With the artist PLANTTDADDII she created Wish N Wash (2023), an animated 3D universe styled as a laundromat and casino inhabited by original characters, inspired by their experience in the Web3 space, which won first place in the Artizen Grant.Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at The Hole in New York, Superchief Gallery during Art Basel Miami, and HEK Basel's “The Second-Guess. Body Anxiety in the Age of AI” in 2025.,
