Making sense of computational science takes a multidisciplinary team, including science visualization experts who translate data into images that both parse information so that it’s comprehensible and render it into beautiful images and skillful animations. Joe Insley of Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and Northern Illinois University has been doing this work for more than 20 years, leveraging deep training in both digital art and computer science to build showstopping visualizations. We talked about his training, how he approaches this work and how in situ visualization—techniques that allow computational researchers to sift through data as it’s processed—is changing with ever larger supercomputers.