Elizabeth Hénaff

Elizabeth Hénaff is a computational biologist whose career has been marked by an interest in artistic practice. She is a professor in the Department of Technology, Culture and Society at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in New York and develops art-based projects for the MIT Media Lab. One of her main research interests involves how living things interact with their environment, an aspect that has informed her recent work. Particularly important is a project to map the microorganisms present in different cities through beehives, research that has generated new ways of studying urban environments. The innovative nature of her research, and her interest in incorporating artistic practice into it, earned her a presence at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Hénaff is currently developing projects to expand our understanding of the urban microbiome, in order to address existing social differences and health problems in cities from a new perspective.