Bio Art: Art Made With Living Organisms and Biological Materials

At the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Canada Pavilion housed something alive. Inside the pavilion, a series of 3.3-meter-tall structures stood in the light, slowly changing color and texture over the months of the exhibition. They were not made of concrete or steel. They were made of bacteria. Specifically, they contained live Synechococcus PCC 7002, a species of marine cyanobacteria capable of bio-mineralization. The bacteria consumed atmospheric carbon dioxide, produced oxygen, and deposited minerals, gradually strengthening the structures over time. The work was called Picoplanktonics, created by architect and bio-designer Andrea Shin Ling and the Living Room Collective. It represented four years of research at ETH Zurich into robotic 3D printing with living materials. At optimal health, each structure could sequester up to 18 kilograms of CO2 per year, comparable to a 20-year-old pine tree. Read more at picoplanktonics.com.

Bio art is art made with living organisms or biological materials as the primary medium. The organisms can be bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, or human cells. Bio artists work with living systems, manipulating biological processes to produce aesthetic, conceptual, or critical outcomes. The field emerged in the 1980s and 1990s at the intersection of art and biology, and it has grown as biotechnology has become more accessible. Bio art raises questions that no other art form can raise: about the ethics of manipulating life, the boundary between art and science, and what it means to create with materials that are alive.

This entry covers the history of bio art from its origins in 1980s genetic art to contemporary practice at the Venice Biennale, the artists who defined the field, and the ethical questions that make bio art unlike any other artistic discipline.

What Is Bio Art and How Does It Work?

Bio art uses living matter as an artistic medium. This distinguishes it from art that depicts biological subjects, like botanical illustration or anatomical drawing. In bio art, the organism is not the subject of the work. It is the material the work is made from. The artwork exists because something is alive within it or because a biological process produced it.

The practice requires access to laboratory equipment, biological materials, and specialized knowledge. Some bio artists are trained scientists who have turned to art. Others collaborate with laboratories and research institutions. The technical processes include bacterial culture, genetic modification, tissue engineering, plant breeding, fungal cultivation, and DNA manipulation. A 2024 practice-based research project from the University of Westminster investigated the use of synthetic biology in art production, examining how artists can employ bioscientific methods that focus on the plasticity of living matter. The research explored the role art practices can play in brokering understanding of life in non-human biological systems. Read the thesis at University of Westminster.

Bio art is distinct from environmental art, which works with natural landscapes and ecosystems but does not necessarily manipulate living organisms at the biological level. It overlaps with bio-design, a related field that applies biological processes to design and architecture, as the Picoplanktonics project demonstrates.

Origins and History

Bio art emerged in the 1980s, when artists began gaining access to molecular biology tools that had previously been confined to research laboratories. Joe Davis is generally credited as the first bio artist. In 1986, Davis created Microvenus, a work that encoded a Germanic rune representing life and the Earth into a DNA sequence and inserted it into E. coli bacteria. The bacteria carried the artistic DNA as they grew and divided, making the artwork a living, reproducing entity. Davis had to navigate MIT's biosafety protocols and institutional review boards to create the work, establishing a pattern that all subsequent bio artists would follow: the creation of bio art is inseparable from the regulatory and ethical frameworks of biological research.

In the 1990s, Eduardo Kac pushed bio art into the public consciousness. Kac coined the term "bio art" in 1997 and has been its most visible advocate. His GFP Bunny (2000) involved the creation of Alba, a rabbit genetically modified to fluoresce green under blue light. The work sparked international controversy about the ethics of genetic engineering for artistic purposes. Kac's The Natural History of the Enigma (2003-2008) created a genetically modified petunia that expressed Kac's own DNA in its veins, blending plant and human genetic material into a single living organism. The work won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica in 2009.

The 2000s saw bio art diversify. The Critical Art Ensemble, working with Beatriz da Costa, created Free Range Grain (2003-2004), a portable molecular biology lab that allowed museum visitors to test food for genetic modification. Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey used genetically modified "Staygreen" grass as a photographic medium, growing grass on walls and controlling its chlorophyll through light exposure to create living photographs. Their Mother and Child (2000) used this technique to create a grass image of a mother and child that would eventually fade and die.

The 2025 Triennale Milano demonstrated how bio art has expanded into architecture and design. Curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley organized We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture, an exhibition that proposed architecture as a living, microbial practice. Andrés Jaque's The Transspecies Palace installed a living skin of cork, fungi, and bacteria that metabolized toxicity and repaired damaged ecologies. The installation proposed a radical departure from extractive building practices toward interspecies cohabitation. Read more at designboom.

Key Artists and Practitioners

Joe Davis (b. 1950)

Davis created Microvenus (1986), the first artwork to use recombinant DNA. He also created Audio Microscope (1988), which translated microscopic organisms into sound. Davis's work at MIT established the precedent that artists could work in biological laboratories, and his practice has consistently pushed against the boundaries between scientific research and artistic expression.

Eduardo Kac (b. 1962)

Kac is the most prominent bio artist and the one who gave the field its name. GFP Bunny (2000) remains the most debated bio artwork ever created. His The Eighth Day (2001) created a closed environment containing genetically modified glowing plants, fish, and mice, exploring the idea of a new day of creation through biotechnology. Kac's work consistently raises questions about the relationship between humans, technology, and other living beings. Read more at ekac.org.

Marta de Menezes (b. 1972)

De Menezes created Nature? (1999), a work in which she modified the wing patterns of live butterflies using a hot needle during their pupal stage. The butterflies were not genetically modified but physically altered during development, producing patterns that existed in no natural species. The work raises questions about the boundary between natural and artificial and about the ethics of modifying living organisms for aesthetic purposes.

Suzanne Anker (b. 1946)

Anker is a pioneer of bio art who has worked with specimens, microscopy, and genetic imagery since the 1990s. Her work often operates at the intersection of art and science, using laboratory imaging techniques as artistic tools. She chaired the Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she established the first bio art laboratory in an art school.

Anna Dumitriu (b. 1969)

Dumitriu creates bio art works using bacteria, genetics, and infectious disease research. Her Normal Flora series explores the bacteria that live on and in the human body. She collaborates with microbiologists and has created works using MRSA bacteria, tuberculosis bacteria, and synthetic biology. Dumitriu's practice demonstrates how bio art can make invisible biological processes visible and tangible.

Andrea Shin Ling

Ling's Picoplanktonics (2025, Venice Architecture Biennale) represents the cutting edge of bio art's convergence with architecture and design. The robotic 3D printing process she developed at ETH Zurich infuses sedimentary scaffolds with living cyanobacteria, creating structures that perform biological functions like carbon sequestration. Her work proposes a reciprocal relationship between living structure and built environment.

Ethical Questions

Bio art raises ethical questions that no other art form faces. Is it acceptable to genetically modify an animal for artistic purposes? Who owns the living organisms in a bio artwork? What happens when a bio artwork dies? These questions are not theoretical. Kac's GFP Bunny sparked a public debate about animal rights and genetic engineering that reached the French president's office. The Critical Art Ensemble's use of bacteria in public performances led to a federal investigation when Steve Kurtz, a member of the collective, was charged under bioterrorism laws in 2004 after calling 911 to report his wife's death and having his bio art materials found by emergency responders. The charges were eventually dropped, but the case demonstrated how bio art occupies a legally ambiguous zone between art and science.

Contemporary bio artists increasingly frame their work in terms of ecological repair and interspecies collaboration rather than manipulation. The 2025 Triennale Milano exhibition and the Venice Biennale's Picoplanktonics both present bio art as a practice of cohabitation with other life forms, not control over them. This shift reflects broader cultural concerns about climate change and ecological responsibility.

See Bio Art in Person

Bio art is exhibited at the intersection of art and science institutions. Look for bio art exhibitions at Ars Electronica in Linz, the Wellcome Collection in London, and the School of Visual Arts Bio Art Lab in New York. The Venice Biennale and Triennale Milano regularly feature bio art and bio-design installations. For online resources, explore the work of Eduardo Kac at ekac.org and the SVA Bio Art Residency program.

For more on the broader field, read our entries on environmental art, installation art, and sustainable art, or explore our blog post on how to read a painting to learn more about analyzing visual art across different mediums.