Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and art. Her videos, installations, and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal.
Commissioned as part of Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide, she produced a three-channel video installation called R/P FLIP R.I.P. at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institute of Oceanography about a Cold War research vessel built to rotate 90 degrees. In 2006 she began a multi-year exploration of the human-animal continuum called Primate Cinema, often in collaboration with cognitive scientist / anthropologist of robots, Deborah Forster. The series culminated in a major award from The Wellcome Trust. Commissioned by Arts Catalyst, she created a film expressly for chimpanzees – Apes as Family, which subsequently showed at Sundance, Berlinale, Ars Electronica, Art Laboratory Berlin, and Microwave Media Art Festival in Hong Kong. Orfeo Nel Canale Alimentare, an animated opera about the digestive tract, was commissioned by Imagine Science Films and showed at REDCAT Theater in downtown Los Angeles. The Life Cycle of Toxoplasma Gondii is a 29 screen installation about the memetic proliferation of cat videos featured at Pitzer College Art Gallery and the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting. As a Guest Curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology she produced the permanent kinetic exhibition on Miracles and Disasters in Renaissance and Baroque Theater. A pioneer in art-science, her projects are featured in books such as Integrative Contemporary Art and Science Practices (Talasek, ed. 2025), The Art-Science Symbiosis (Velasco and Nieto, eds. 2024), and The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (Terranova, ed., 2017). Professor at Harvey Mudd College, she teaches courses such as Animal Media Studies, Nonhuman Media Art, and Art & Biology.
@softscientist
@rachelmayeri.bsky.social
https://www.vdb.org/artists/rachel-mayeri
