Vera Molnár, born 1924 in Hungary, is one of the pioneers of computer and algorithmic arts.
Trained as a traditional artist, Molnár studied for a diploma in art history and aesthetics at the Budapest College of Fine Arts. She iterated combinatorial images from as early as 1959. In 1968 she began working with computers, where she began to create algorithmic paintings based on simple geometric shapes geometrical themes. Molnár created her first non-representational images in 1946.

These where abstract, geometrically and systematically determined paintings. In 1947 she received an artists’ fellowship to study in Rome at the Villa Giulia, and shortly after moved to France, where she currently resides. In the late 1960s she gained access to a computer at a research lab in Paris and began learning programming languages such as Fortran and Basic. At that time she co-founded several artist research groups: GRAV, who investigate collaborative approaches to mechanical and kinetic art, and Art et Informatique, with a focus on art and computing. In 1968 she started to create computer-based plotter drawings and algorithmic paintings based on simple geometrical themes.

Since the 1990s, her work has been featured in major international solo and group exhibitions and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA NYC), the Victoria&Albert Museum and the Centre Pompidou. In 2005 she was the recipient of the first lifetime achievement award “d.velop digital art award [ddaa]”. In 2018 she won the AWARE Outstanding Merit Award (AWARE Prix d'Honneur), an award supported by the French Ministry of Culture that acknowledges leading female figures in the world of culture.