Jaime Levy

Background

Jaime was born March 8, 1966 in Hollywood, California and raised in the San Fernando Valley. In 1988, she graduated with a B.A. from San Francisco State University. In 1990, she earned her Master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program where she later spent seven years as a part-time professor. She currently teaches a graduate level course on UX design and strategy at the University of Southern California (USC) in the Viterbi School of Engineering.

Career

Her career began in 1990 with the creation of the electronic magazines Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood. They were programmed in HyperCard and Macromedia Director and distributed on 800k floppy disks. She leveraged her publicity from numerous print publications and tv to increase the sales of these disks in book stores and mail-order.

In 1993, she worked with EMI Records where she designed, animated, and programmed the first commercially released interactive press kit (IPK) for Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk CD digipack. The project featured sequenced samples, digitized video, hypertext, and interactive animation all integrated together as a seamless experience. She followed that up with the animated electronic book, Ambulance, that was written by Monica Moran and included music by Mike Watt from the band Minutemen and art by Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets.

In 1994 while employed by IBM as an interface design, she began hosting "CyberSlacker" salons for programmers and animators at her East Village loft. By 1995, she took a creative director position at Icon CMT, where she could focus on the creation of the online magazine WORD. It received national recognition for its design and cutting-edge non-linear storytelling. She was recognized as Newsweek’s top 50 people to watch in cyberspace and on Good Morning America as one of "The Most Powerful Twentysomethings in America."

As the dot-com era took off, she went on her own as a consultant. In 1996, she designed a graphical multi-user environment called Malice Palace using The Palace software. Set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, users could engage in real-time chat and interact with robots depicted as homeless people. Prints from Malice Palace were exhibited in a group show titled "Channel 3" at Team Gallery in New York alongside Tracey Emin, Erik Brunetti and Pedro Ortuno.

In 1997, her Silicon Alley-based start-up called Electronic Hollywood received an angel investment. For the next 5-years her company focused on web design, interactive advertising, and original content development. The most prestigious production was the CyberSlacker, Flash cartoon series, which won the Flash Animation Award. She appeared in Doug Block’s 1999 documentary film Home Page and her story was chronicled in the book Gig.

Not long after the dot-com bubble burst, she shuttered Electronic Hollywood and returned to Los Angeles. From 2002 to the present she has resurfaced as a college professor, author, and user experience design strategist. In 2010, she founded her second company JLR Interactive.