Esther Polak is a visual artist active in new media. She is most well-known for her locative media projects. Polak studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague from 1981 till 1986, and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam from 1986 till 1989.
With a consistent interest in landscape and in contemporary ways of visualizing space and geography, Polak turned to visualization and mapping as artistic tools, and an integral part of the basic concept of her work. In several of her long-term projects such as Amsterdam Realtime, the MILK project and NomadicMILK, Polak makes mobility, routes and trajectories visible from the perspective of participants, in an intuitive and personal manner.
With the MILK project, Esther Polak won the Gada Balva Prix (Riga, Latvia) in 2004. In 2005, she was awarded the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. Since the beginning of 2010, Polak collaborates full-time with Ivar van Bekkum. Both live and work in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.