Anna Dumitriu starts bioart residency in neuroscience at VIB-KU Leuven
In August, internationally acclaimed bioartist Anna Dumitriu visited the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research to kick off an art-science residency collaboration. Anna is a pioneering artist working at the intersection of art, microbiology, synthetic biology, and ethics. Her practice is deeply collaborative, often involving scientists, medical researchers, and technologists to explore how emerging biotechnologies shape our understanding of life, identity, and disease. She’s interviewed by Bethan Burnside, Science Communicator at VIB and art-science curator, to find out more.
Was bioart a popular artistic medium when you first started out?
When I first started out, there were only a handful of people working in bioart — figures like Eduardo Kac and Joe Davis. Kac’s book Telepresence and Bio Art, published by University of Michigan Press Press in 2005, was one of the first comprehensive volumes to define bioart as a distinct artistic practice. Reading it was a turning point for me. I remember thinking, “This is exactly what I want to be doing.”
Even before that, I’d been drawn to cellular forms and scientific imagery in my painting practice. I used to get catalogues from the Scientific Photo Library given to me because I loved those kinds of images. Also, long before the book or the documentary came out — and back when the internet was barely in use — I was already fascinated by the story of HeLa cells. That was in the late ’90s, and I kept finding myself inspired by science-related narratives like that.
Years later, when Yetisen et al published their review of bioart in Trends in Biotechnology, I was listed as creating bacterial bioartworks and installations in 2008, while I'd actually started much earlier — but I guess I was a bit under the radar at that time.
What would you say are the benefits of doing art-science residencies, both for scientists and artists?
Speaking from my experience as an artist, I find this kind of science deeply fascinating, because at its core, it’s about what makes us who we are. The questions scientists grapple with are, in many ways, the same ones that artists explore as well. Artists can choose almost anything as their subject or muse. For Picasso, it might have been a crying woman; for Cézanne, an imposing mountain like Mont Sainte-Victoire. For me, it’s science: its practice, its philosophy, and the questions it raises about existence and identity. For instance, during this visit to your center, I was shown incredible data from the Electrophysiology Unit — numbers so staggering they seem almost surreal. They told me that the brain contains around 86 billion neurons connected by 528,000 miles’ worth of synaptic connections, which is long enough to wrap around the Earth more than around 20 times! We started talking about the idea of the mathematical and dynamic sublime, and how the sheer scale of these facts strains the imagination. Most people struggle to even conceptualize it, and yet these scientists are trying to understand it empirically.
Artists can benefit from working with scientists because it opens up new ways of seeing the world — turning complex data and abstract ideas into something tangible, emotional, and relatable. But empirical research can also benefit from art-science residencies; this happened in The Mutability of Memories and Fates, a project that grew out of my residency at the Institute of Epigenetics and Stem Cells in Munich, where I spent over four years working closely with scientists. What fascinated me about their work was this idea that cells carry memories of what they once were, even after they’ve been reprogrammed. It’s not just metaphorical; it’s embedded in the chromatin structure of their DNA. I became obsessed with the question: if you take a population of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and guide them into becoming different cell types — neurons, lung cells, heart cells, liver cells — and then reprogram them back to iPSCs between each transformation, what happens? Do they retain traces of their previous identities? No one had ever tried it before, so we did it. We gave these cells four different lives, and then we brought them back again. And then there’s this poetry to the experiment, it asks questions about the potential of this kind of research to affect life-extension or even immortality.
What drew you to doing an art-science residency at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research?
You invited me! [Laughs] And I thought, well, that sounds interesting — why not? When people are kind enough to reach out and show genuine interest in my work, I’m usually keen to collaborate. I mean, how could a visit to a neuroscience research center not be fascinating?
You’ve just wrapped up a jam-packed week filled with lots of meetings with scientists and getting hands-on in the lab. What things have you found most interesting?
Honestly, everything I’ve seen this week has struck me as fascinating. I’ve lost count of how many scientists I’ve met — probably around 40, each for about an hour or so. I’ve felt like a sponge, trying to soak up every detail. From fly sleep research to zebrafish studies, to human neurons growing in mouse brains, as well as brains-on-chips, hibernating hamsters, amyloidosis, mass spectrometry... it’s all been amazing!
One area that really caught my attention was necroptosis, a form of cell death that affects neurons in Alzheimer’s disease. I was already familiar with apoptosis, another kind of programmed cell death, from a project I did back in about 1998 with Dr Anand Saggar-Malik, a clinical geneticist at St George’s Hospital; they were capturing time-lapse images of apoptosis, and I responded with a series of etchings. Now, I’m excited by the idea of potentially revisiting that body of work and layering in necroptosis. There’s a lot brewing creatively.
What moved me most during this visit was hearing from researchers working on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or motor neuron disease, as we call it in the UK. I was amazed to learn that, thanks to recent breakthroughs from the scientists here, a small percentage of ALS patients can now be treated and even regain lost functions. It’s a glimmer of hope for a disease that, until very recently, was considered universally fatal. That really stayed with me.
Do you consider your work as science communication? Is there any overlap between bioart and science communication?
I see my practice as a way of opening up scientific conversations to patients and the public, creating space for dialogue that’s non-hierarchical and inclusive. At a science festival, for example, if someone has a “silly little question,” they’re unlikely to raise their hand in a room full of strangers. Even within science itself, there’s a culture of imposter syndrome — people afraid of being “caught out” for not knowing something.
I pride myself on asking the questions that pop into my head in real time — because I genuinely don’t understand, and I really want to! I try very consciously not to just nod along. That curiosity becomes a vessel for translating scientific stories into my work, and in turn, giving the public access to those stories. It breaks down barriers. People feel free to chat, ask questions, and let the conversation flow. That’s how understanding happens.
And then the questions deepen: How does this fit into someone’s life? Their worldview? What’s going to happen next? Is there any hope for these diseases? Because it’s not enough to say, “We want early diagnosis.” If there’s no solution, then what? You’re just asking people to spend more of their lives worrying. So, there’s an ethical balance to strike—how we tell these stories, how we consider the person on the other end. They might never read the paper in Nature, but they might see the artwork. And that artwork might carry a story they need to hear.
That said, I see science communication as a byproduct of what I do – my main focus is making art.
Have you ever experienced misconceptions about artists when working with scientists?
One of the biggest assumptions scientists often make when I visit is that I’m just there to look at pretty images. And yes, I’ve seen plenty of microscopy visuals, and they’re stunning, but that’s not really what I’m after when I visit a research institution. People sometimes think I’m there to make their science look “pretty,” something they can put onto a conference poster. Well, they could use my work on a poster... but it might look a bit strange! I’m not there to decorate the data. I’m there to dig into the ideas, the metaphors, the philosophical undercurrents. The aesthetics are part of it, but they’re not the point.
Have any of your works ever been controversial?
Smithsonian Magazine once ran an article on my work, which sparked a lot of attention on social media. There were plenty of comments like, “Why is an artist allowed to work with bacteria?” But that’s the nature of public-facing work; you learn to expect those kinds of reactions. More recently, my Plague Dress went viral again on TikTok after it was exhibited at the Thackray Museum in Leeds. Once again, questions surfaced about whether showing this kind of work was truly safe. This time, though, the museum stepped in and responded directly. We created short videos that explained the piece and the process behind it beautifully. We used the moment as an opportunity to educate, rather than letting the work be reduced to shock value, because that’s never what my practice is about. It’s always rooted in the genuine story, the science, and the human experience behind it.
Could you tell me more about your past project, Trust Me, I’m an Artist?
Trust Me, I’m a Scientist was a project I led with ethicist Professor Bobbie Farsides, designed to explore the specific ethical challenges artists face when working with scientific or biological materials in bioart. It was a collaboration between Brighton & Sussex Medical School in the UK and Waag Society in Amsterdam. The format was deliberately provocative: we staged mock ethics committees where artists submitted regulatory forms and defended their proposals in front of an ethics committee. After the artist left the room, the committee debated the case live, with the audience invited to ask questions and share their views. These sessions sparked incredibly rich discussions around ethics, consent, and artistic freedom.
We later compiled the case studies into a book titled Trust Me, I’m an Artist: Towards an Ethics of Art and Science Collaboration. Alongside my own contributions, the book featured case studies of artists like Adam Zaretsky, whose work often involves genetic manipulation and pushes the boundaries of ethical acceptability in both art and science. It also included Art Orienté Objet, a duo known for visceral, body-based bioart, such as trans-species blood transfusions and immunological experiments. One particularly memorable case was Neal White’s proposal, which interrogated institutional ethics and public engagement. He wanted to restage an artwork he’d previously done where participants to consume methylene blue — a nod to Yves Klein’s 1958 exhibition Le Vide, where guests drank blue cocktails to become living canvases of International Klein Blue. Although methylene blue isn’t harmful, scientists had discovered it could cross the blood-brain barrier. The original Ethics Committee he approached at the National Institute of Medical Research rejected his proposal, calling it something like “unnecessary human research.” So, Neal simply staged it at the Barbican Gallery in London instead. His initial performance was actually a great inspiration for the whole Trust Me, I’m an Artist project.
You mention “unnecessary research”, which reminds me of your project, The Institute of Unnecessary Research. Could you tell me more about that?
The name actually came from one of the greatest films about how science works, Ghostbusters. There’s a moment where someone’s described as doing a lot of “unnecessary surgery,” and I just loved the rhythm of that phrase, and it stuck with me. It made me think back to the early days of my bioart practice, when I wanted to work with what was then called “normal flora bacteria,” the organisms that naturally live in and on us. This was long before the term “microbiome” entered public consciousness, and before we understood how vital these microorganisms are for digestion, immunity, and regulation. Back then, they were seen as passive passengers, not essential cohabitants. We didn’t have the tools to study them properly, but I was studying ideas around the sublime and became captivated by the idea of that the unseen microbial world could be an expression of a bacterial sublime, a notion I coined — the idea that we live in a sea of bacteria, breathing them in, carrying them on our skin, and communicating with them through chemical signals. I wanted to explore it.
There was a TV show at the time called How Clean Is Your House?, where they’d swab pillows and say things like, “That’s a Yersinia species — related to the plague!” Which was usually a stretch. Even within one species, you have pathogenic and non-pathogenic strains. But the media loved fearmongering around bacteria back then. I started wondering: what if instead of asking “How clean is your house?”, we asked “How sublime is your ecosystem?” So, I began swabbing everything—mapping the microbial landscape of my home, taking microscopy images, and turning them into textile works in collaboration with microbiologist Dr John Paul at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in the early 2000s.
Then I met Dr James Price, and in around 2010 he told me he’d been growing MRSA on chromogenic agar that turned a beautiful denim blue. I asked, “Could we sterilize it? Could we grow it onto cloth?” He said, “No idea!” No one had ever tried. So, we did — and it worked. The bacteria sterilized, the color held, and I created the MRSA Quilt. That’s the kind of journey that led me here. Back then, this kind of exploration was considered “unnecessary research.” People told me it wasn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack, but rather like looking for a billion needles in a billion haystacks. But now we have tools. We’ve evolved. And this is what curiosity-driven research looks like: it may not have an immediate purpose, but it taps into a universal human desire to understand.
We shouldn’t limit what we study based on tools, methods, or funding. I’ve always dreamed of a world where everyone could participate in research: where childlike curiosity isn’t crushed, but cultivated. It’s the same with art. People’s creative instincts are often shut down early, and I don’t want anyone to feel that way. I want them to make art. I want them to do research. And sometimes that research might be fundamental, and sometimes it might be “unnecessary.” But “unnecessary” doesn’t mean useless. It doesn’t mean unimportant. It just means it doesn’t fit into the narrow frameworks of funding or urgency. But without it, we lose the basic research that underpins everything else. I suppose that’s what I’ve been doing all along: making space for the sublime, the overlooked, the “unnecessary.” And showing that sometimes, that’s exactly where the most important questions begin.
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