Adrian Van Allen

Adrian Van Allen is an anthropologist, artist, and designer. Her work engages the history of science and emerging technology through both academic scholarship and fine art that includes sculpture, photography, interactive media, replicas of scientific objects, prints, and drawings.

Her work has shown internationally at such venues as The Fontanone Estate (Rome, Italy), the North-by-Northwest Media Festival (Liverpool, UK), Southern Exposure Gallery (San Francisco, CA), the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA), Cantor Center for the Arts (Stanford University), the Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), and the Public Netbase Media Center (Vienna, Austria). Her work has been featured at SIGGRAPH, Museums on the Web, and is included in the Rhizome.org ArtBase.

Van Allen has created exhibits for NASA, the Exploratorium, the Smithsonian, UC Berkeley, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and was founding creative director of ReadyMade magazine. She held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in Anthropology (2010–2013), was a Rome Prize Fellow in Design at the American Academy in Rome (2011), and a Buck Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (2014-2015). She has received grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Council of Museum Anthropology, the Film Arts Foundation, New Langton Arts, and has been an artist-in-residence at the Djerassi Foundation, Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, American Academy in Rome, and the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry program.

Van Allen holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from UC Berkeley. Her dissertation, titled “Crafting Nature: An Ethnography of Natural History Collecting in an Age of Genomics,” examines the mining and extending of natural history collections to archive all life in the face of mass biodiversity loss, focused on an ethnographic study of the Smithsonian’s Global Genome Initiative. She also holds two MFAs from the California College of Art in interactive media and in photography, and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is based in Oakland, CA.