Sourced from the DASH (Digital ArtS Histories) list:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/dash

LeRoy White (1936 - 2007)

LeRoy White, an early adopter of digital art-making, died unexpectedly on February 28, 2007.  He was 71 years old, and taught at the Rhode Island School of Design (USA) for over 40 years.

With a history of exhibitions in sculpture and conceptual art, LeRoy began investigating digital imaging in the  mid-1980s.  At the Rhode Island School of Design, he was director of the IBM/RISD Fine Arts Imaging Research Project, focusing on how issues of composition and
design could be explored with the computer.

White exhibited and spoke about his digital images in the first and second Arts and Technology Symposia held at Connecticut College 1986 and 1989 (curated by Cynthia Beth Rubin and David Smalley), and was included in the 1986 exhibition on the Artist and the Computer in Louisville (curated by Roberta Williams), the 1987 exhibition "Hypergraphics VIII" and several other early digital imaging exhibitions.

Working with his colleague Bert Beaver, he organized the first digital imaging exhibition in Rhode Island in 1988, at the Bannister Gallery of Rhode Island College. Through this exhibition and his
teaching efforts, LeRoy was instrumental in bringing the new field of computer art to a large number of colleagues, and paved the way for the integration of computers into the sphere of fine art.

At the time of his death, LeRoy White was working on a series of digital photographs, subtly manipulated and masterfully printed in his own studio.  His digital photographs are in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and the Dayton Art Institute.  He was a graduate of the University of Dayton and the Rochester Institute of Technology.