Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and artist with interests in new media art and culture, especially generative systems and data-aesthetics Mitchell's background is in music and the visual arts (by way of an interdisciplinary first degree in the Faculty of Creative Arts at Wollongong University). After teaching at Wollongong with Frances Dyson, he became more interested in art and cultural theory and continued to develop creative work in digital sound and image. He began postgraduate study at the University of Technology, Sydney, in 1996, working with Douglas Kahn on a research project exploring art, emergence and artificial life. He completed a PhD in 2001, moving the same year to Canberra to take up a position at the University of Canberra.

Mitchell's writing has appeared in journals including Leonardo, Digital Creativity and Contemporary Music Review. In 2004 his work on a-life art was published in the book Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (MIT Press, 2004). Other recent highlights include the Visible Archive, a research project on the visualisation of archival datasets, funded by the Ian Maclean Award of the National Archives of Australia. His current work spans generative art and design, digital materiality, and data visualisation. Mitchell is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, where he leads the Master of Digital Design. He blogs at The Teeming Void.