Robert Whitman (May 23, 1935 – January 19, 2024) was an American artist best known for his seminal theater pieces of the early 1960s combining visual and sound images, actors, film, slides, and evocative props in environments of his own making.

[4][1] Whitman was a member of the group of visual artists - Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg - who in the early 1960s presented theater pieces on the Lower East Side in Manhattan.

Whitman presented more than 40 theater pieces in the United States and abroad, including American Moon, E.G. and Mouth at the Rueben Gallery.

In the fall of 2004, Whitman presented a theater performance, Antenna, in Leeds, England, sponsored by Lumens, as part of the New Media Festival there.

Whitman, working with Experiments in Art and Technology, E.A.T., in the early 1970s, developed and participated in a number of innovative communications projects : - Anand Project: he was part of an interdisciplinary team to develop methods for instructional television programming for rural Indian villages; - Children and Communications, open environments for children to work with a variety of communication equipment; - Telex: Q&A: a worldwide person-to-person question and answer opportunity using telex equipment in New York, Stockholm, Ahmedabad, India, and Tokyo; - Artists and Television, artists’ programming on New York cable channels.

In 1972, Whitman produced his first telephone piece, NEWS, in which participants, using pay phones, called in reports which were broadcast live over radio station WBAI.

A later performance in Leeds, England in 2002, utilized cell phones, and the calls were broadcast in real time on large speakers in a public square in the town.