Kristina Hooper Woolsey

Who is Kristina Hooper Woolsey?

Dr. Kristina Hooper Woolsey is an American scholar and cognitive scientist known as the "mother of multimedia" for her pioneering work at the Apple Multimedia Lab and Atari Research Labs, which she directed. Woolsey was a founding member of the Apple Human Interface Group.

She was named a Distinguished Scientist by Apple Computer in acknowledgment of her pioneering work in multimedia in education, and an NMC Fellow by the New Media Consortium for her lifetime of contributions to the field.

As a postdoctoral fellow in architecture in the 1970s, she explored the connections between "movies," e.g. film and video, and physical spaces. As an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz she explored geographic information systems, working on the Aspen Movie Map as a visiting faculty member at MIT.

She has served in a myriad of roles, including executive producer of a range of critically acclaimed multimedia titles, including Life Story, the Visual Almanac, and Voices of the Thirties. Woolsey is author of many articles, chapters, and books, including VizAbility, from Ceengage Publishers, which she coauthored with Scott Kim and Gayle Curtis. She served as co-editor with Sueann Ambron for Learning with Interactive Multimedia from Microsoft Press.