SoVA Anderson Lecturer
Heather Dewey-Hagborg
Anderson Lecture – September 16, 2025
Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a New York-based artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.
Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, Transmediale, the Walker Center for Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and PS1 MoMA. Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, SFMoMA, among others, and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Art Forum and Wired.
Heather has a Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium, and is an affiliate of Data & Society. She is a founding board member of Digital DNA, a European Research Council funded project investigating the changing relationships between digital technologies, DNA and evidence.
Artist's Statement
How much can I learn about a stranger from a hair?
Is it possible to fall in love with someone through their DNA?
Could I make a virus that infects the world with love?
These are some of the questions that have inspired my work, at the intersection of art and biology. The questions that intrigue me are philosophical, scientific, and political. Artistic practice for me is like playing detective in a novel that is always changing; there will be no grand reveal at the end, but the work is a process of constant discovery.
All technology is political, and as an artist working with biotechnology I find it crucial to engage these biopolitics directly. This is also the site I find most exciting artistically, to show the embedded politics in technologies and social structures that might otherwise be missed.
Through creative practice in the medium of life itself my work aims to draw viewers into a deep and complex relationship with their own biology, and a visceral understanding of the social impact of new technologies. Through close reading and careful writing of the material of a biotechnology, I aim to subject it to critique, open it to play, and sometimes to subvert it.
Due to its liminal status, art at the intersection of science is uniquely poised as a critical practice. It contains the potential for a kind of self-reflexive art that examines its own terms. This doubling is both a critique and homage. By dissecting its very materials, it can utilize a medium to reflect upon itself. Such a dual form comes from a place of passion for the beauty and elegance of science, of genuine love for the act of experimentation, combined with an endeavor to realize its framing, an attempt to understand its flaws, limitations, and biases.
It is my hope that coming from this place of conflicted admiration and scrutiny empowers my work to tackle issues and ideas that are difficult to articulate with conventional media. Often it is through the process of experimentation, through hands-on work with the material of a discipline that its organizational contradictions come to light. By physically engaging with the production of scientific knowledge and technological application I hope to untie some of these more hidden knots, and to use materials of the discipline to show rather than say what I find.
© 2009–2025 Heather Dewey-Hagborg