.
Born as
Judith Ann Powers in Boston a month after Pearl Harbor, Malloy was raised
in Massachusetts. Her mother was a writer and editor and her father, a Normandy
veteran, worked as Assistant District Attorney in two Massachusetts counties and
then as Chief Assistant US Attorney for Massachusetts. Malloy skied and played
tennis, summering in New Hampshire, Cape Cod and the Berkshires. Malloy felt an
early calling to the visual arts and began painting and sketching as a
child.
After
college, unable to make a living as an artist, Malloy took a job at the Library
of Congress. In 1965 she met electronics engineer Jim Malloy. They traveled to
Europe and married in Nürnberg in 1968.
In the next
few years, Judy Malloy worked as a technical information specialist at the NASA
contractor Ball Brothers Research Corporation, running their technical library
and learning FORTRAN programming in order to identify relevant content for
research.
Moving to
the East Bay in the early 1970s, Malloy was divorced in 1977. She lived in
Berkeley where, in addition to installations and performances, she developed a
series of books that incorporated non-sequential narratives driven by words and
images.
In 1986,
Malloy wrote Uncle Roger, the first online hyperfiction project with
links that took the narrative different directions depending on the reader's
choice. Uncle Roger was mentioned as the start of a future art form by
the Wall Street Journal in their 1989 centennial
publication.
In 1989,
Malloy's hyperfiction work its name was Penelope was exhibited, gaining
publication in 1993 by Eastgate Systems. Also in 1993, Malloy was invited to
XEROX PARC as artist-in-residence, where she wrote a collaborative
hypernarrative with Cathy Marshall and developed Brown House Kitchen, an
online narrative written in LambdaMOO. Malloy then wrote l0ve0ne,
published in 1994 by Eastgate Web Workshop as their first work. Malloy created
Making Art Online in 1994. One of the first arts websites, Making Art Online is
currently hosted by the Walker Art Center.
Malloy
worked for Arts Wire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA)
from its early origins in 1993. She began serving as editor of the online
periodical Arts Wire Current in March 1996. She continued as editor
through the periodical's name change to NYFA Current in November, 2002,
until March 2004.
Judy Malloy
is the editor of Women, Art & Technology, published in 2003 by MIT
Press, 2003, and she currently hosts the Art California
Web.