Anna Dumitriu

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Anna Dumitriu
Bioart
Notable workThe Romantic Disease, Make Do and Mend, ArchaeaBot: A Post Singularity and Post Climate Change Life-form The Institute of Unnecessary Research Trust me, I'm an artist: towards an ethics of art/science collaboration
MovementBioArt

Anna Dumitriu (born 1969) is a pioneering

Brighton, England, specialising in BioArt. Her installations, interventions and performances use digital, biological and traditional media including bacteria, digital technology and craft techniques, working with diverse audiences.[2]

Dumitriu's work is at the forefront of art and science collaborative practice, particularly working with

Sussex University between 2005 and 2014. She was co-chair of the Arts and Culture Subcommittee of the Alan Turing Centenary. Dumitriu is founder and Director of the Institute of Unnecessary Research and was lead artist on the "Trust me, I'm an artist: towards an ethics of art/science collaboration" project working with the Waag Society in Amsterdam and co-author of the book of the same name. She has written extensively on the notion of the "bacterial sublime
".

Her work has an international exhibition profile and has been featured in Frieze, Artforum Wired UK and The Lancet.

Her "Romantic Disease" project explores around historical and contemporary notions of Tuberculosis, whole genome sequencing of bacteria, global health and antimicrobial resistance.

Plague Dress by Anna Dumitriu, on display at the Thackray Museum of Medicine

Recent artwork focusses on

antibiotic resistance, and sequencing of bacterial DNA. She created "Make Do and Mend" in 2017 which uses the CRISPR gene editing technique of homologous recombination to edit the genome of E. coli bacteria to remove an antibiotic resistance gene and replace it with the phrase "Make Do and Mend" written into its DNA. The CRISPR Journal described the project as "perhaps the first application of CRISPR gene editing technology in BioArt" and continued "To date, the pioneer in using CRISPR technology for Bio-Art is Anna Dumitriu, a well known British bio-artist. Dumitriu conceived, developed, and exhibited for the first time in 2017 an artwork based on the use of CRISPR at the LifeSpace Gallery for science and art research (Dundee, United Kingdom) as part of the Future Emerging Art and Technology exhibition."[4]

In 2024, the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds hosted a solo exhibition of Dumitriu's work, Fragile Microbiomes, including existing pieces and brand new works.[5]

In January 2014, Dumitriu told The Guardian: "Art, for me, is a way of investigating the world. In that way, I see no real distinction between art and science at all."[6]

Notes

  1. ^ "Anna Dumitriu: Bioart and Bacteria". www.annadumitriu.co.uk.
  2. ^ "KT Press". Archived from the original on 29 August 2010. Retrieved 21 March 2010.
  3. ^ Art Practice in Digital Culture
  4. ^ The CRISPR Journal
  5. ^ "Fragile Microbiomes - Thackray Museum of Medicine". thackraymuseum.co.uk. Retrieved 29 May 2024.
  6. ^ Barnett, Laura (20 January 2014). "Art in good health: how science and culture mix the best medicine". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 July 2016.

External links