First Chair Professor for Image Science since 2005. He gave more than 350 lectures and keynotes worldwide. Grau's Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion (MIT Press) is with 2000+ citations the most quoted art history monograph since 2000. His main research is in the histories of media art, immersive images, art and emotion, artificial life and digital humanities.

Grau developed the first international Archive for Digital Art (ADA) since 1998, funded by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF). His recent publications are Imagery in the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2011), Museum and Archive on the Move (2017) and Retracing Political Dimensions (2021). Grau was founding director of the MediaArtHistories world conference series. In 2015, he was elected into the Academia Europaea and in 2019 he received the Science Award of the State of Lower Austria.