John Orion Young is a fourth-generation artist trained as a painter and sculptor. He makes JOYWORLD, an expanding world of creatures, objects, and experiences sculpted in virtual reality. He lives and works in Miami Beach.

Young began making sculpture alongside his father before he was old enough to remember exactly when. One of his earliest works was a lost-wax bronze of a duck. As an Eagle Scout, he built the Willow Creek Nature Trail in his hometown of Lamar, Colorado. In high school, he constructed a fourteen-foot hatchet that still stands on the school grounds.

While studying art in college, Young co-founded and ran FU Collective, a cooperative art gallery in Denver’s Santa Fe Arts District. After college, he apprenticed under Paul Budnitz and helped build Budnitz Bicycles, eventually moving with the company to Vermont. He later left for San Francisco, where he designed math and science apps at Brilliant.

In 2016, Young began asking everyone he knew if they had a virtual reality headset. No one did. He eventually found a dinosaur demo at Best Buy, lost his mind, went home, taught himself how and built a little powerful yellow PC, and bought an HTC Vive.

He spent nearly every hour at home inside Tilt Brush, dancing and drawing in the air. At the time, Tilt Brush did not let artists reposition the environment, so making an artwork meant physically circling, ducking, and reaching around it. Virtual reality did not simulate a studio for Young. It became one.

In 2018, Young wrote and deployed his own Ethereum contract for JOYWORLD and began minting 3D artworks sculpted in virtual reality as NFTs. People say he is the first to do each of these things. He later forked the contract and migrated the artworks himself, while inspiring many other artists to begin experimenting with the technology.

For Young, NFTs were never the art. They are infrastructure: the ownership layer in a much larger stack of digital art. His deeper commitment is to the idea that digital art can be software and that the experience of encountering, owning, and living with it can be continually reinvented.

Young has live-sculpted in virtual reality at Oculus Connect 4, inside Facebook’s television studio, and alongside Gary Vaynerchuk at VeeCon. His work has been exhibited at the Crypt Gallery in New York’s Dream Hotel and many other art shows. JOYbot, the second JOY ever created, sold at Sotheby’s for $252,000.

He also sculpted in virtual reality with Jimmy Buffett. Then they partied. Jimmy Buffett was somehow even cooler than the idea of Jimmy Buffett.

His work is collected by people you have heard of, people no one has heard of, and people who prefer not to be heard of.

Young does not think of himself as inventing JOYWORLD so much as receiving it.

“I don’t make JOYWORLD. I manifest it through the JOYs that show up in my life and say, ‘Hey, let’s make something fun today.’”