ionee Waterhouse is a video artist and Live Visuals Performer whose video-mapping work approaches the moving image as a living presence capable of reorganizing perception, feeling, and symbolic meaning. Her work spans video art, live visuals, video mapping, animation, AI-generated imagery and large-scale installation, and is unified by the understanding that images change us. 

Images shape us. They act on us. They change how we see, how we understand ourselves and how we relate to the world around us.

Waterhouse thinks visually, almost spatially, building compositions that behave like ecosystems rather than edited sequences. They grow, twist, collide and reorganize themselves through 2D and 3D animation, video recordings and computational transformations. Her influences, including mythology, ancient cultures, color theory, media history, symbolic systems, perceptual science and the evolving intelligence of machines, move like currents beneath the surface, guiding the emotional and symbolic logic of her imagery.

Her early collage works revealed her sensitivity to the politics of images. By bringing political speech, found footage, music and media fragments into fast, charged collisions, she exposed how power and narrative inhabit our visual field. These early experiments taught her that images are never neutral; they carry histories, intentions, and invitations into feeling and doctrine.

Before developing her current visual language, Waterhouse spent years moving through the worlds of mass media, music, and teaching. In her early twenties, she took part in creating Cara de Vidrio, an experimental television show in Caracas, Venezuela, where video collage and media critique were used to turn television into a mirror of itself, exposing its narratives, power structures and visual habits from the inside. Working in television post-production for networks such as HBO, MTV, DirecTV, and FOX further gave her an intimate understanding of how images are engineered and consumed at scale, as well as the limits of standardized visual narratives. Touring with musicians and orchestras marked a turning point. Images became live, responsive systems shaped by sound, architecture and collective presence. As an educator introducing one of Latin America’s first university courses on live visuals and video art, she shaped a practice rooted in experience, intuition and a close study of how images act on the body and mind.

As a live video performer and video-mapping artist, Waterhouse brings her visuals into dialogue with space and audience. In live performances at festivals such as Mutek, Burning Man and Ypsirock, and in collaborations with musicians across electronic and orchestral traditions, her visuals merge with performance, creating a single dynamic system. Her environments are marked by bursts of symbolic emergence, rapid montage and shifts in speed and rhythm that guide collective attention. In these moments, the image doesn’t sit on a screen; it fills the air, shaping the emotional charge of the space.

Her projection on the Parthenon in Athens reflects this instinct. She treated the façade of the Theater of Dionysus not as a static backdrop, but as a living membrane where ancient stone and digital light could coexist and evolve together. The work suggested that history is not fixed but permeable, and that the digital image, when placed in contact with the monumental, can open a dialogue between permanence and becoming. This principle runs through her site-specific work: images as forces that negotiate between worlds, times and states of consciousness.

In her recent work, Heaven+Earth, Waterhouse turns scans of Sarpotta’s sculptures and contemporary faces into AI-animated images that gather, unravel and reform. The work becomes a meditation on perception and the cyclical nature of being, where the eternal and the human meet in states of becoming. Her interventions keep something essential alive in these forms, revealing how presence persists even as identity dissolves and reshapes itself.

Time, for Waterhouse, is a material. She bends it, stretches it, accelerates it and collapses it, not for spectacle, but to interrupt the habits of seeing that narrow our attention. Rapid sequences, loops and ruptures create openings for viewers to experience perception differently, sometimes with a clarity that arrives before understanding.

Waterhouse’s practice has been recognized across contemporary art, music and new media communities. Her work has appeared in collaboration with the Andy Warhol Museum and alongside artists such as Banksy at the Kronos Contemporary Art Festival in Barcelona. Her pieces form part of the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Maracaibo and the Museo Civico di Castelbuono, one of the first museums to acquire an AI-generated video artwork. She has long collaborated with composer Desmond Child and developed large-scale visual environments for classical concerts during her residency at Berklee College of Music. Much of her work exists only in the moment it is created, live and unrepeatable, shaped entirely by presence.

Across all forms, her images behave like semiotic organisms, mutating and generating meaning in real time. Her installations and performances function as perceptual rituals, thresholds inviting viewers to move from watching to participating, becoming part of the event itself.

Waterhouse’s practice is deeply intuitive and grounded in lived experience. She works with images the way others work with clay or sound: as materials alive with temperament and agency.

In a world saturated with visual noise, Waterhouse offers something rare: work that does not merely illustrate meaning but creates the conditions for new meaning to arise. Images that act. Images that intervene. Her work lives at the intersection of ritual and technology, intuition and computation, ancient symbolism and digital flux. It is expansive, intelligent and rooted in a lifelong fascination with how perception shapes the human experience.