Anna Dumitriu is a British artist who works with bioart, sculpture, installation and digital media to explore infectious disease, synthetic biology, AI and robotics.Trained as a painter,she works hands-on with living bacteria, including tuberculosis and MRSA, treating them, in her words, as an artistic medium she can work with “almost in a painterly kind of way”.
She gained a master's degree in painting from Brighton in 1996, before seeking out a scientist to collaborate with despite having no formal training in microbiology. She grows bacteria on cotton calico and antique embroidery and crochet, applying diagnostic dyes and antibiotics so that the bacteria's growth and resistance patterns form the finished textile.In 2004 she founded The Institute of Unnecessary Research, a hub for artists and researchers working experimentally with curiosity-driven research.
Among her works on antibiotic resistance is the Antibiotic Resistance Quilt (2017), an embroidered quilt impregnated with traces of drug-resistant bacteria, including strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae, MRSA and Neisseria gonorrhoeae, grown on dye-treated diagnostic agar. Some patches are made from E. coli that Dumitriu edited using CRISPR to remove its drug-resistance genes, work carried out with Dr Sarah Goldberg and Dr Roee Amit at Technion in Haifa during her Future Emerging Art and Technology residency.The same residency produced Controlled Commodity, a 1941 wartime dress marked “CC41” for controlled commodity, mended with patches of similarly gene-edited bacteria, referencing 1941 as the first year penicillin came into use.
With her partner Alex May, she has also produced digitally driven works such as ArchæaBot, an underwater robot modeled on some of the most ancient life forms on Earth, made through a residency with LABoral. In 2014 she co-authored, with Professor Bobbie Farsides, the book Trust Me, I'm an Artist, which examines the ethical questions raised when artists make work inside laboratories. Her work is held in collections including ZKM, the Science Museum London and the Eden Project, and she has twice been nominated for the EU S+T+ARTS Prize, for Make Do and Mend in 2017 and Susceptible in 2022.
