Carla Avolio is a communications professional with a passion for telling stories about our natural world. Originally from Australia, she has held communication positions in science institutions in Sydney, including the Powerhouse Museum and the University of Sydney. Since moving to Germany, she has worked as a science communicator in the Cluster of Excellence at the University of Konstanz and continues communications work in her current role at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. In her distant past, Carla fulfilled her childhood dream of working with animals by completing a Zoology degree in Sydney. She still tags along on the occasional field trip with her biologist husband.

Bianca Vienni-Baptista, PD PhD, is Group Leader of ‘Cultural Studies of Science’ and Lecturer at the Transdisciplinarity Lab of the Department of Environmental Systems Science (USYS TdLab), ETH Zürich (Switzerland). Bianca works in the field of anthropology of science, focusing in particular on the study of collaborative knowledge production processes. As a result, she has centred her research on the specific conditions for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and on the production and social use of knowledge in different countries, including the role of universities and other institutions. Her latest publications include Institutionalizing Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity Collaboration across Cultures and Communities co-edited with Julie Thompson Klein (Routledge, 2022).

Zeynep is a PhD researcher at Erasmus University. Her research focuses on collaborations involving art, science and technology. She is at the same time part-time and guest lecturer in the faculty of Arts & Culture, Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship. Zeynep also works at Waag Future Lab, co-leading the Open Design Lab and art-science research program. Her work involves developing art science as a research and creative practice. She designs, mentors and implements artist residency programs in industry with an aim to situate art in wider contexts where technology is critically approached in its relationship to society and the ‘more than human’ through the value-based paradigm of mattering.

Jane Calvert is a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research is on the social studies of the life sciences, particularly synthetic biology. She works in close collaboration with scientists, engineers, policy makers, artists and designers. She is co-author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press). Her new book A Place for Science and Technology Studies will be published by MIT Press in January 2024.

Sarah Durcan is the Executive Director of Science Gallery International. Sarah has a degree in Communications from DCU and a masters in Cultural Policy and Arts Management from UCD. She serves on the advisory panel of Dublin City Council’s Culture Company. She was a lead organiser of the #WakingTheFeminists campaign to achieve gender equality in Irish theatre. Sarah has a background in theatre producing and financial management and worked as the Executive Producer for award-winning Irish theatre company, Corn Exchange, as General Manager of Dublin Theatre Festival and General Manager of Dublin Fringe Festival. As a consultant producer and strategic advisor she has worked with ARCANE Collective Dance Company and Theatre Lovett on their international tours. She has served on the boards of The Abbey Theatre, Theatre Forum and GAZE Film Festival.

Dr. Tabea Golgath studied American Studies and History and received her PhD on effective mediation methods in exhibitions. In parallel, she worked for 10 years as a museum educator and conducted countless project seminars in cooperation with museums at Leibniz Universität Hannover and the University of Basel. Between 2018 and 2023, she developed and managed the funding program LINK - AI and Culture of the Foundation of Lower Saxony. She is committed to transdisciplinarity, agility and digitality and today works as a research officer at the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony.

Donia Hamdami is a university instructing designer, coach and facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration through artistic interventions. She holds a degree in industrial design and a degree in production design for film & electronic visual media.
Selected activities:
- 2018 professorship TH OWL chair of university didactics in architecture, interior design and urban planning
- Since 2017 special coaching for professors, scientists and lecturers at international universities
(e.g. University of Potsdam, TH OWL, UDK Berlin, Queens College NY, NYU-NYC etc.)
- since 2016 Special Coaching: "the synergies of creativity and team dynamics" in c level management
- since 2014 Coaching for Artists in co creation
- since 2013 lecturer + coach at Hasso- Plattner- Institute Potsdam, school of design thinking + HPI academy, innovation and science

Jens Hauser is a Paris and Copenhagen based media studies scholar and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. After being a guest professor in art history he is currently a researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), at University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion and at École Polytechnique Paris-Saclay, as well as a distinguished faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program. He has curated about thirty international exhibitions and festivals internationally.

Irène Hediger is head of the artists-in-labs program (AIL), Department of Cultural Analysis at the Zurich University of the Arts. She curates and promotes transdisciplinary exchange and practices interfacing art, science and technology in the fields of environmental science, astrophysics,neuroscience and medicine. In 2009, she initiated the international artists-in-labs Residency Exchange program.
Hediger has curated numerous exhibitions and accompanying programs on contemporary art, science and technology such as: “Quantum of Disorder”, “(in)visible transitions”, “Displacements – Art, Science and the DNA of the Ibex” and “Propositions for A Poetic Ecosystem” and “Interfacing New Heavens”.

Dr Mairéad Hurley is Assistant Professor in Science Education at the School of Education, Trinity College Dublin, where she is a member of the Science & Society research group. Her research interests lie at the intersection of science communication, education, and public engagement, with a particular interest in research and practice in non-formal learning environments that connect the STEM disciplines with the arts. She is increasingly focusing her work on issues of climate justice and democracy in education, through her role as Principal Investigator of the €2.4M Horizon Europe project LEVERS, and as lead for Trinity College Dublin's participation in the Critical ChangeLab project, led by the University of Oulu.

Prior to joining the School of Education, she was Head of Research & Learning in Science Gallery Dublin, where she led the €3M European Commission funded SySTEM 2020 project, which mapped informal science learning in 22 countries. She holds a PhD in astronomy (Dublin City University), a Professional Diploma in Education (University College Dublin) and a B.Sc in Physics & Astronomy (National University of Ireland, Galway). As a concertina player, she is a renowned exponent of Irish traditional music, having recorded and performed extensively across multiple continents.

Dr. Ryan Jefferies is Director of Science Gallery Melbourne and the Grainger Museum, and Director of Learning and Academic Engagement, Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne. He is also a Fellow of the Centre of Visual Art at the Victorian College of the Arts. Ryan has over twenty years' experience within the cultural sector and as a research scientist at leading Australian and international institutions. He is a passionate advocate of the blurred intersections between arts, technology and science and the bold promotion of social change through disruptive and speculative creativity.

Frank Kupper works as a researcher, facilitator and theatre practitioner at the intersection of science and society. His mission is to contribute to openness and dialogue across this boundary. As an associate professor at VU University Amsterdam, he takes a lead role in (inter)national initiatives to promote reflection, dialogue and transformation in science-society relations with help of the arts. With his theatre company Mens in de Maak, he integrates participatory theatre with playful reflection. Here, theatre becomes a method to create conversations that matter about the role and future of science in society.

Christina Landbrecht is the director of the art program at the Schering Stiftung. Born in Munich, she moved to Berlin to study art history and business administration at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She subsequently worked as curatorial assistant at the Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art, where she later took the position of assistant to the director, Dr. Thomas Köhler. When the excellence cluster “Bild Wissen Gestaltung” (Image Knowledge Gestaltung) was established at Humboldt-Universität, she returned there as a research associate and to write her dissertation. Entitled “The Problem and Potential of Artistic Research,” the PhD-thesis deals with the relationship between the natural sciences and the visual arts since the 1990s. She puts this knowledge to good use for the Foundation, bringing together the expertise of both artists and scientists in productive ways and inspiring interdisciplinary dialogues and projects.

Freo Majer is the Artistic Director of Forecast, an international facilitating program that transcends disciplines to promote artistic practices through individual mentoring, collaborations with scientific and cultural institutions, and research trips. Through festivals, workshops, discursive events, and publications, a wide audience encounters and engages with the final productions as well as the creative processes behind them.
Majer looks back at a career as an opera director and producer in European theaters and festivals. Driven by his own experience, and recognizing a gap in the type of support available to cultural workers, he founded Forecast in 2015.
He initiated the international research program Driving the Human (2020-2023) and its predecessor Housing the Human (2017-2019).
Freo Majer serves on various boards, including the Governing Board of the European architecture platform LINA, the Board of the Cultural Forum of Social Democracy, and chairs the jury of the KAIROS Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation.

Dr. Katja Naie has worked at the Schering Stiftung, Berlin, as director of the Science Program since September 2015, and as Managing Director since July 1, 2019. After studying biology and completing her PhD in neuroscience, she worked as a researcher at ETH Zurich. In 2007, she moved to the Hertie Foundation, where she initiated and directed the information portal www.dasGehirn.info. She is co-author of the children’s nonfiction book “Denkste?!: Verblüffende Fragen und Antworten rund ums Gehirn” (You think? Amazing Questions and Answers around the Brain) and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Graduate School of Neuroscience in Bochum. Building bridges between science, art, and society is her personal passion, and she strives to achieve this goal in her daily work at the Schering Stiftung.

Kristian H. Nielsen is associate professor in science communication at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests covers popular science, science and the media, public participation in science, and science-art relations. He has published on representations on science and technology in Gerhard Richter’s artworks, and he takes a historical interest in art-science collaborations during the Cold War.

Dr. Margherita Pevere is an artist and researcher working across biological arts and performance with a distinctive visceral signature. Her inquiry hybridizes biotechnology, ecology, queer and death studies to create artworks that trail today’s ecological complexity. Her body of work is a blooming garden crawling with genetically edited bacteria, cells, sex hormones, microbial biofilm, ash, blood, slugs, growing plants and decomposing remains. She is affiliated to the Eco- and Bioart Lab and co-founded the artists’ group Fronte Vacuo.
More information at www.margheritapevere.com, https://frontevacuo.com and http://m-ooo.info.

Jahnavi Phalkey is a historian of science and technology, and a filmmaker. She is the Founding Director, Science Gallery Bengaluru which is part of an international network of eight galleries. The 140,000 sq. ft. gallery is among the most ambitious public engagement projects in India and seeks to ‘bring science back into culture’. Previously, Jahnavi held a tenured faculty position at King’s College London. She was Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin. She was also external curator to the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich. Jahnavi is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and has co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. She is the producer-director of the documentary film Cyclotron.

Prior to founding Asia’s first Science Gallery, Phalkey was an external curator at the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich. She was tenured faculty at Kings College London before taking on her current role and has also been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. She is the editor in chief the British Journal for the History of Science – Themes (Cambridge University Press) and South Asian Studies (Taylor and Francis). She is also director and producer of the documentary film, Cyclotron (2017).

Claudia Schnugg holds a PhD in social and economic sciences with an additional focus on cultural sciences and media arts. Her practice is twofold: as scholar she is researching artscience collaborations by investigating effects, impact, and value of processes and the relevance of the outcome. As curator, she develops projects, programmes, and exhibitions at the intersection of art and science. Currently, she is curating projects at ESA/ESTEC, Helmholtz Center Munich, TU Berlin, works with Pro Helvetia, is co-curator of Naturarchy Resonances IV at the European Commission’s JRC, and leads a research project at Johannes Kepler University. More informationen at www.claudiaschnugg.com.

Robertina Šebjanič is an artist whose work explores the ecological, geopolitical, and cultural realities of aquatic environments and the impact of humanity on other organisms. In her analysis of the Anthropocene and its theoretical framework, the artist uses the terms “Aquatocene” and “aquaforming” to refer to the human impact on aquatic environments. Her projects call for the development of empathetic strategies aimed at recognizing the rights of more-than-human entities. Her artwork Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva generator (a. p.) is part of New Art {collection;} in Spain since 2019. Her works have received awards and nominations at Prix Ars Electronica, Starts Prize, and Falling Walls, Re:Humanism and many more.

She has exhibited/performed at solo and group exhibitions as well as in galleries and at festivals: Ars Electronica (Linz), Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City), Matadero
(Madrid), La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), Le Cube (Paris), MONOM, CTM (Berlin), Art Laboratory Berlin, ZKM (Karlsruhe), re:publica (Berlin), Mladi Levi (Ljubljana), Centro de Cultura Digita (Mexico City,) Device art and Touch me festival_Kontejner (Zagreb), Congteporary art museum Beograd - MoCAB, Eastern Bloc (Montreal), Eyebeam (New York), Palais des Beaux-Arts BOZAR (Bruselj), and more.

Rasa Smite is Riga and Karlsruhe based artist and co-founder of RIXC Art Science Center in Riga, Latvia. She holds PhD, and currently is a Professor in Liepaja University, Latvia, and Senior Researcher at Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Switzerland. She also has been a visiting lecturer at MIT in Boston, US, and guest professor at HfG Karlsruhe.
In her artistic practice, she works together with Raitis Smits as an artist duo, together creating visionary and networked artworks. Their artworks, such as more recent VR - Atmospheric Forest (2020), have been awarded, nominated and shown widely in Europe, North America and Asia.

Timo Vesala has been Professor of Meteorology. His main research fields are biosphere-atmosphere interactions, ecophysiology and carbon and water cycles in forests, wetlands and lakes and greenhouse and other trace gas exchange with the atmosphere. His expertise ranges from cell, plant, ecosystem and regional to global scales. He is the member of National Climate Panel 2020-2023. Vesala has contributed to public debate on climate impacts of forestry. He has promoted and produced several pieces of art combining art and science. He has run a film club with Dr. Eija Juurola since 2009. He has prepared a popular talk “From Vertigo to Blue velvet – Connotations between movies and climate change”.

Emma Weitkamp is Professor in Science Communication at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Her research interests centre on narrative approaches to science communication, considering both arts and media practices. She is particularly interested the different actors involved in the communication process, including both scientists, artists and audiences. Recent work has focused on science & theatre, exploring the motivations of those developing science & theatre performances (including scientists, theatre professionals and science communicators). This work was published in a recent co-authored book: Science & Theatre, communicating science and technology with performing arts (Emerald Publications, co-authored with Carla Almeida, Fiocruz, Brazil).

Anna Dumitriu is an award winning internationally renowned British artist who works with BioArt, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship to infectious diseases, synthetic biology, and robotics. Her past exhibitions include ZKM, Ars Electronica, BOZAR, The Picasso Museum, HeK Basel, Science Gallery Detroit, MOCA Taipei, LABoral, Art Laboratory Berlin, and Eden Project. She holds visiting research fellowships at the University of Hertfordshire, and Waag Society, as well as artist-in-residence roles with the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford, the National Collection of Type Cultures at the UK Health Security Agency and the Institute of Epigenetics and Stem Cells at the Helmholtz Zentrum in München. She was the 2018 President of the Science and the Arts Section of the British Science Association. Her work has featured in many significant publications including Frieze, Artforum International Magazine, Leonardo Journal, The Art Newspaper, Nature, and The Lancet. Current collaborations include the EU CHIC Consortium, the EU CAPABLE Consortium, the University of Leeds. Her work is held in several collections including ZKM, The Science Museum in London, The Computer Arts Society CAS50 Collection, Eden Project, and the Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum.

https://annadumitriu.co.uk/

Diethard Mattanovich is Professor of Microbial Biotechnology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU). At BOKU and acib (the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology), he investigates the application of yeasts for the conversion of carbon dioxide and other renewable feedstocks into chemicals of our daily use, such as biopolymers.

He is Chair of the International Yeast Commission, and of the Microbial Biotechnology Division of the European Federation of Biotechnology. More information at: https://short.boku.ac.at/wq92r60

Alex May is a British contemporary artist questioning how our individual and collective experiences of time, and formation of memories and cultural record, are mediated, expanded, and directed by contemporary technologies. His work forges creative links between art, science, and technology through a wide range of digital new media, including virtual and augmented reality, photogrammetry, algorithmic photography, interactive robotic artworks, video projection mapping, generative works, performance, and video and sound art.

His international exhibition profile includes Ars Electronica, LABoral (Spain), IMPAKT (Netherlands), FACT (Liverpool), Furtherfield (London), WRO Media Art Biennale (Poland), HeK (Basel), The Francis Crick Institute, Bletchley Park, Eden Project, Science Gallery in Dublin (Ireland) and Bengaluru (India), ZHI Art Museum (China), and the Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine. Alex is a Visiting Research Fellow: Artist in Residence with the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire since 2011. More information at:

https://alexmayarts.co.uk/

 

Sonja Schachinger is an Austrian independent producer, curator and art & science mediator. She has many years of international exhibition experience and has already worked for Atelier Victoria Coeln, Biofaction KG, Studio Sonja Bäumel and the #TullnART exhibition. Her focus is on digital and multimedia art. In this field, she has already worked for the Kunstmeile Krems, the Mauthausen Committee Austria and the spell GmbH. She directed the mediation format WE GUIDE YOU of the Ars Electronica Festival four times. She is curator of the Art & Science project fermenting futures, a cooperation of the University of Applied Arts Vienna and BOKU – Life Science University Vienna. Within NIPAS - Nomadic Institute of political Art & Science team, she is responsible for the dissemination. As a new format of Pro Helvetia, she is mediating the NanoARTS programme, in cooperation with the Adolphe Merkel Institute. More information at: https://proper-partner.net/

Ingeborg Reichle, PhD, is a contemporary art historian and cultural theorist and currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany, writing about art, science, and sustainability. In recent years she served as Professor in the Department of Media Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria and as founding chair of the Department of Cross-disciplinary Strategies (CDS). Her current area of research and teaching is focusing on the encounters of the arts with the sciences. Before joining the faculty of the Department of Media Theory as full professor in 2016, she was FONTE professor at Humboldt University Berlin. In 2004 she gained her Ph.D. from the Humboldt University Berlin with the dissertation Kunst aus dem Labor, published in 2005 with Springer. She is also advising a number of institutions like the Schering Stiftung Berlin (co-organizing the Art and Science Forum from 2003-2008), the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia (co-organizing the NanoARTS program from 2020-2022), or the Sci-Art Project at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy, the European Commission’s science and knowledge service (currently co-curating the NaturArchy program). In March 2022 she joined the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe ZKM’s Board of Trustees.

Sarah Donderer is a curator interested in the intersections of art, science and technology. Since 2020 she has been holding the position of a curator at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and has co-curated the exhibitions BioMedia. The Age of Media with Life-like Behavior (2021/2022), Renaissance 3.0. A Base Camp for New Alliances of Art and Science in the 21st Century (2023/2024), and the scientific and artistic collaboration project Driving the Human. Seven Prototypes for Eco-Social Renewal (2020–2023). In 2021 she was part of the curatorial team of the exhibition Machine Does Not Give Change, Device_art festival, Zagreb, Croatia.

She studied art history and sociology in Munich and has been involved in various exhibitions and art projects, including at the Kunstverein München, Deichtorhallen Hamburg and design museum Die Neue Sammlung in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and worked as a freelance project manager and assistant director for independent theater productions.

David Judge is a Lecturer in Science Communication based in the Science Communication Unit at the University of the West of England, Bristol. David’s research centres around qualitative and action research approaches to exhibition and programme production and visitor experience. He teaches science communication across undergraduate and postgraduate levels in areas including scientific controversies, museology and communication skills. David draws on a background working in the science centre sector in events, programming and evaluation.

 

 

The art historian and curator Babette Werner explores interdisciplinary approaches dealing with time, space and transformation at the intersection of art, ecology and technology. She researches on aesthetic links between visual interpretations of natural phenomena and social discourses and seeks to contribute to a genealogy of an ecological aesthetic. She works as a curator and researcher and develops exhibitions and cultural projects for international art institutions, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Neue Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and Pinakothek of the Modern, Munich. She is associated member and PhD Candidate at the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« (MoA) and teaches at the Institute for Art and Visual History at Humboldt University in Berlin, holding a PhD scholarship by Gerda Henkel Stiftung. She is a member of MoA`s research group Object Space Agency and of Art | Material | Ecology at Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

Dr. Camilla Audia, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick, specialises in interdisciplinary social sciences with a focus on climate resilience and environmental justice, . She brings diverse actors together for non-hierarchical equitable knowledge co-production and innovative solutions to global challenges with a distinctive emphasis on arts-based practice as a tool for disrupting hierarchies and decolonising agendas. Experienced in teaching and research, she has held roles at King's College and the University of Sussex. Her work has global reach, including projects in Africa and Asia. A recipient of multiple grants, such as the NERC Innovation Placement, she is also an invited speaker at international events and has contributed to peer-reviewed journals and policy reports.

Theatre director, actor, playwright, professor and senior researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of the University of Coimbra.
He is the artistic director of Marionet [www.marioneteatro.com], a theatre company focused on the interplay between theatre and science, where he directed more than 50 plays.
His research interests relate to the interactions between the performing arts and science, including science dramaturgies, worldwide production of plays related to science, research-based theatre, theatre with researchers and the performing arts in science communication.

I am interested in exploring how art-science collaborations can be used to investigate, challenge and change public perceptions on some of the most pressing threats facing our oceans. Specifically, I am interested in how we can combine sound and audio data with artistic methods to investigate the impacts anthropogenic changes are having on our seas. As an artist researcher I combine both my experience as a practcsing musician, film maker and sound artist with my background as a political and cultural geographer. More information at www.geraintrhys.com

Miguel González Virgen was born in 1964 in Colima, Mexico. He has a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College (1988) and a Master of Architecture I (M Arch I) degree from the Graduate School of Design also from Harvard University. Between 2013-2017 Miguel González Virgen was at the Catholic University of Leuven doing his doctoral dissertation. He received his PhD in Art History with the dissertation ‘Artistic Research in the Visual Arts: Definitions and the Quest for Paradigms.’ Back in Mexico, in 2021 he became Leader of the Arts Initiative for Monterrey at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, as well as Director of Science Gallery Monterrey.