Mike Winklemann, also known as Beeple, is a 39 year old father of two living in Charleston, South Carolina. He chose the name Beeple after a 1980s toy whose nose lit up in response to light and sound, which was loosely connected to the kind of early art he was making. Beeple graduated from Purdue in 2003 with a computer science degree but no education in art. He started his career in designing corporate websites and then journied into doing freelance work focusing on digital animations for companies like Apple, SpaceX, etc. He was doing all this while never missing a single day of his art work titled Everydays which was a collage of images every day for 5,000 days. His art often depicts bizarre, hilarious, disturbing, and sometimes grotesque images. He smashes together pop culture, technology, and postapocalyptic terror into blistering commentaries on the way we live. Today, Beeple has 1.8 million follwers on instagram yet his art work is not shown in any galleries and have no foothold in the traditional art world.
