Ryan Browning is a painter and interdisciplinary artist. His artwork uses gameplay as a means to explore the aesthetic intersections between environment, architecture, and cultural iconography, through the medium of painting. In his creative research, Ryan also investigates and combines drawing and illustration techniques, animation and time-based media, digital fabrication, and open-source physical computing as means to communicate visually and teach skills and concepts that are foundational to art and design education.

Ryan received a BA in Art History and Curatorial Studies from Brigham Young University in 2005, with a special emphasis on Middle Eastern and Near Eastern cultures. Following this, he received an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art in 2008 from the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Mount Royal School of Art program.

Ryan has exhibited widely in the United States, and is currently preparing a new body of work to be included in a solo exhibition in Dubai, along with a collection of drawings made collaboratively with fellow artists, to be published as an art folio. He is also preparing to conduct a documentary survey of emerging contemporary art and design communities in the region to compare obstacles to community-building and self-sustainability and the strategies these communities employ to overcome them.

"I think about games while painting - especially games that result in stories or abstract narratives, like the role-playing experienced in Dungeons and Dragons or the symbolic movement of conquering armies in Risk. The process of painting is building up a layered surface in a game-like fashion - you’ve got some constraints, but there’s also a lot of room within the fiction of painting or gameplay to explore the unknown. Chance accidents happen, altering the gamer/painter’s stream of thought. You give names to things that are otherwise represented by abstract data, shapes, textures, or systems, and you carve your way into that world by exploring and making changes to it as needed. You get to know the territory. Once it becomes familiar, you begin to inhabit it, tell yourself stories about it. The work becomes invigorated, animated, in a way.”