Oron Catts


Most Recent Affiliation(s):


  • The University of Western Australia, Royal Col­lege of Arts and Aalto University, SymbioticA, Design Interaction and Biofilia-base for Biological Arts, Visiting Professor

ISEA Bio(s) Available:


  • ISEA2014

    Oron Catts, artist, cofounder of Symbiotica, Adjunct Lecturer and Researcher at the        School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia.

    ISEA2013

    Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator whose pioneering work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project, which he established in 1996, is considered a leading biological art undertaking. In 2000 Catts Co-founded SymbioticA, an artistic research centre in the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at The University of Western Australia. He is currently the Director of SymbioticA, a Visiting Professor of Design Interaction at the Royal College of Arts, London, and a Visiting Professor at Aalto University’s Biofilia- base for Biological Arts, Helsinki. Catts’ work reaches beyond the confines of art, often being cited as an inspiration in areas as diverse as new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction and food.

    ISEA2011

    Oron Catts is Di­rec­tor of Sym­bi­ot­icA- The Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence in Bi­o­log­i­cal Arts, School of Anatomy and Human Bi­ol­ogy, The Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Aus­tralia, and Vis­it­ing Pro­fes­sor of De­sign In­ter­ac­tion, Royal Col­lege of Arts, Lon­don, UK.  Oron Catts is an artist, re­searcher and cu­ra­tor whose work with the Tis­sue Cul­ture and Art Pro­ject (which he founded in 1996 with Ionat Zurr) is part of the NY MoMA de­sign col­lec­tion and has been ex­hib­ited and pre­sented in­ter­na­tion­ally. In 2000 he co-founded Sym­bi­ot­icA, an artis­tic re­search lab­o­ra­tory housed within the School of Anatomy and Human Bi­ol­ogy, The Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Aus­tralia. Under Oron’s lead­er­ship, Sym­bi­ot­icA has gone on to win the Prix Ars Elec­tron­ica Golden Nica in Hy­brid Art (2007) and be­came a Cen­tre for Ex­cel­lence in 2008.  In 2009 Oron and Ionat were recog­nised by Thames & Hud­son’s “60 In­no­va­tors Shap­ing our Cre­ative Fu­ture” book in the cat­e­gory “Be­yond De­sign”, and by Icon Mag­a­zine (UK) as one of the top 20 De­sign­ers, “mak­ing the fu­ture and trans­form­ing the way we work”. The lat­est show he cu­rated was Vis­ceral – the Liv­ing Art Ex­per­i­ment at the Sci­ence Gallery, Dublin, 2011. Oron has been a re­searcher at The Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Aus­tralia since 1996 and was a Re­search Fel­low at the Tis­sue En­gi­neer­ing and Organ Fab­ri­ca­tion Lab­o­ra­tory, Har­vard Med­ical School, Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal, Boston from 2000-2001. He worked with nu­mer­ous other bio-med­ical lab­o­ra­to­ries around the world. In 2007 he was a vis­it­ing Scholar at the De­part­ment of Art and Art His­tory, Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. Some of his past art pro­jects in­clude tis­sue en­gi­neered food and leather, in which the “steaks” and “jack­ets” were cul­tured in a lab­o­ra­tory set­ting to in­ter­ro­gate the pos­si­bil­ity of vic­tim­less an­i­mal prod­ucts; the Pig Wings Pro­ject, in which sev­eral pairs of wings made from pig bone mar­row stem cells were grown, and Extra Ear-1/4 Scale, in which a minia­ture replica of Aus­tralian per­for­mance artist Ste­larc’s left ear was grown using human car­ti­lage cells.

    ISEA2004

    Oron Catts is co-founder and artistic director of SymbioticA and tissue engineering artist.

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