Beeple

Biography

Beeple is the professional name of Mike Winkelmann, an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator born in 1981 in Wisconsin and now based in Charleston, South Carolina. Beginning in 2007, Winkelmann committed to creating and posting a new digital artwork every single day, a practice he called 'Everydays' that he has continued for well over a decade. This daily discipline built an enormous body of work spanning surreal, satirical, and technologically inflected imagery that often comments on politics, celebrity culture, and technology. In March 2021, Christie's auctioned 'Everydays: The First 5000 Days,' a composite of his first 5,000 daily images, for $69.3 million, making it one of the most expensive artworks ever sold by a living artist and a landmark moment that brought NFTs and digital art into mainstream attention. Beeple has since collaborated widely across the crypto and collectibles space, including the VeeFriends project with entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, and has produced large-scale physical and augmented reality installations such as 'Human One,' a hybrid sculpture and video work. His art often features dystopian or futuristic scenes rendered in a hyperreal, maximalist digital style, blending 3D modeling, animation, and design software into a signature visual language. Winkelmann has become one of the most recognizable figures associated with the NFT art movement, frequently discussed alongside debates over the value, legitimacy, and future of blockchain-based art. He continues to release new work through his personal platforms and NFT marketplaces, maintaining the daily practice that first built his following, while expanding into robotics-themed art, large-format installations, and cross-media collaborations.