Jeffrey Shaw has been a leading figure in new media art since its emergence from the performance, expanded cinema and installation paradigms of the 1960’s to its present day technology-informed and virtualized forms. In a prolific career of widely exhibited and critically acclaimed work he has pioneered the creative use of digital media technologies in the fields of expanded cinema, virtual and augmented reality, immersive visualization environments, navigable cinematic systems, digital cultural heritage and interactive narrative.

The son of Polish immigrants, Jeffrey Shaw was born in 1944 in Melbourne. Shaw left Australia in 1965 after two years of university studies in architecture and art history at the University of Melbourne, and then briefly took up sculpture at the Brera Academy, Milan (1965) and Saint Martins, School of Art, London.(1966).  

Shaw was a founding member of Artist Placement Group in London (1966–) and of the Eventstructure Research Group in Amsterdam (1969–1979). On Heinrich Klotz’s invitation, he moved to Germany in 1991 to the assume the position of founding director of the Institute for Visual Media at the  ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. For the next eleven years he initiated and led a seminal artistic research, production and exhibition program at the ZKM that included residencies and the creation of new works by many  notable media artists of his time, including Masaki Fujihata, Toshio Iwai, Bill Seaman, William Forsyth, Bill Viola, Tamas Waliczky and Luc Courchesne.  He also curated ground breaking new media art exhibitions such as Bitte berühren, NewFoundLand, Future Cinema and the ArtIntAct series of digital publications. In 1995, Shaw was appointed Professor of Media Art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG), Germany. 

In 2003 Shaw was awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship , and returned to Australia to co-found and direct the UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research in Sydney. At iCinema he led a research program in immersive interactive post-narrative systems, which produced pioneering new media art installations such as T Visionarium 

In 2009 Shaw joined the City University of Hong Kong as Chair Professor of Media Art and until 2015 he was also Dean of the School of Creative Media. In 2010, together with Professor Sarah Kenderdine, he established the CityU Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALiVE) at the Hong Kong Science Park, a next-generation platform for interdisciplinary applications in digital cultural heritage that included Pure Land – Inside the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang shown at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Washington in 2012. Over the last years, this research trajectory includes projects relating to Chinese martial arts (with Mr. Hing Chao) and the Confucian Rites (with Professor Peng Lin and Mr. Johnson Chang). 

Until Augst 2021 Shaw was Yeung Kin Man Chair Professor of Media Art at City University Hong Kong and Director of the CityU Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media (Hong Kong and Chengdu). In September 2021 he was appointed Chair Professor at the Academy of Visual Art, Baptist University Hong Kong. Shaw is currently also Adjunct Professor at City University Hong Kong, Visiting Professor at Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and Visiting Professor at the Laboratory for Experimental Museology at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). 

A distinctive aspect of Shaw’s art practice are his deep-going co-operations with other artists, writers, composers, photographers and engineers, which include Sarah Kenderdine, David Pledger, Tjebbe van Tijen, Theo Botschuijver, John Choy, Dirk Groeneveld, Jean Michel-Bruyere, Bernd Lintermann,  Gideon May, Huib Nelissen, Wooster Group, John Latham, Dennis Del Favero, Harry de Wit, Cedric Maridet, Paul Doornbusch, Agnes Hegedüs, Leith Chan, Adolf Mathias, Larry Abel, Peter Weibel, Leoson Cheong, Hector Rodriguez, Joseph Chan, Yossi Landesman. 

Shaw's awards and honours include: Immagine Elettronica Prize, Ferrara, Italy, 1990; Oribe Award, Gifu, Japan 2005; Honorary Doctorate in Creative Media, Multimedia University, Malaysia, 2012; University Distinguished Professor at UNSW Australia, 2015; Honorary Professor at the Danube University Krems, 2015, Austria, Lifetime Achievement Award, Society of Art and Technology, Montreal, Canada, 2014; Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Visionary Pioneer of Media Art, Linz, Austria, 2015. 2020 ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art, 2020.

Shaw currently resides in Hong Kong and Lausanne, Switzerland.