Victoria Vesna

Victoria Vesna is a media artist, professor and chair of the department of Design | Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts. She is also director of the recently established UCLA Art|Sci center and the UC Digital Arts Research Network.

Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. She explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. For the past few years she has been collaborating with nanoscience pioneer James Gimzewski to develop a series of installations that address the impact of nanoscience on culture and consciousness in an experiential manner. Their work was exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Seoul, Korea, Beijing, China, Perth, Australia and Rome, Italy. Her most recent work, Mood Swings, deals with environmental effects on mental health and was exhibited in University of Washington and in a festival in Berlin. Other notable works are Bodies INCorporated, Datamining Bodies, n0time and Cellular Trans_Actions.

Victoria has exhibited her work in 16 solo exhibitions and over 70 group shows, published 20+ papers and given 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is recipient of many grants, commissions and awards, including the Oscar Signorini award for best net artwork in 1998 and the Cine Golden Eagle for best scientific documentary in 1986. Vesna's work has received notice in numerous publications such as Art in America, National Geographic, the Los Angeles Times, Spiegel (Germany), The Irish Times (Ireland), Tema Celeste (Italy), and Veredas (Brazil) and appears in a number of book chapters on media arts. She is the North American editor of AI & Society and editor of Database Aesthetics, to be published by Minnesota Press in 2006.