LEONARDO@DJERASSI | SESSION 1
June 24 – July 29, 2025
Claire Blanchette | Mixed Media | Tucson, AZ
Claire Fall Blanchette (b. 1994, Maine, USA) is an artist working across multiple disciplines including sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. She is the recipient of the Marcia Grand Centennial Sculpture Prize (University of Arizona), Reba Stewart – Genevieve McMillan Travel Fellowship (Massachusetts College of Art and Design), and was an artist-in-residence at Konstepidemin Arts Center in Gothenburg, Sweden. Claire has exhibited in the US and abroad including at the Lionel Rombach Gallery (Tucson, AZ), Environmental Natural Resource 2 Building (Tucson, AZ), Gallery at Mountain Shadows (Phoenix, AZ), WestValley Art Museum (Peoria, AZ), Evelyn Peeler Peacock Gallery (Corning, NY), 440 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Ejecta Projects (Carlisle, PA), and Konstepidemin Arts Center (Gothenburg, Sweden). Claire holds a BFA in Printmaking and History of Art from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston and received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Arizona in Tucson in May 2025.
Heidi Boisvert | Technology Performance | Gainesville, FL
Heidi Boisvert, PhD is an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist, and academic researcher who interrogates the neurobiological and socio-cultural effects of media and technology. Simply put, she studies the role of the body, the senses, and emotion in human perception and social change. Boisvert is mapping the world’s first media genome, while taking great care with its far-reaching ethical implications. She founded futurePerfect lab, a creative agency and think-tank that works with social justice organizations to design playful emerging media campaigns to transform the public imagination. She also architects expanded reality and transmedia storytelling experiences, and devises large-scale networked dance and theatre using biocreative technology and co-founded XTH, a company creating novel modes of expression through biotechnology and the human body. She worked with David Byrne on Theater of the Mind, an immersive theater piece and co-curated EdgeCut, a live performance series exploring human-digital relationships. Boisvert is Associate Professor of AI & the Arts at the University of Florida, a Senior Research Fellow at the Norman Lear Center, and a research affiliate in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT.
Heather Lockie | Composer | Los Angeles, CA
Heather Lockie is an L.A.-based composer, performer, and painter who creates graphic score, soundscape, song, installation, improvisation, and through-composed works. Often using stringed instruments, voice, and found objects, Lockie’s work stretches from ensemble and solo performances to formal string arrangements for herself and for others’ music to realizing her own graphic scores in performance.
Frequently drawing from whatever soundmaking devices are at hand – a string trio, close vocal harmonies, a penny whistle, live-processed field recording, an oven rack, a folk song, a bell – she has imagined a unique hybrid form where traditional song form can intentionally — or aleatorically — merge with abstract sound-painting expressions and organic sonic pathways. Her two solo albums under the moniker Marshweed (Point of Contact, 2025;Marshweed in the Garden, 2017) both employ such logic, presenting collections of music as wildly diverse as the experiences of a single day of life in Los Angeles.
Lockie’s performances and residencies include Leonardo@Djerassi 2025 (Woodside, CA), Studio for Centrum (Port Townsend, WA), Hill House Residency (East Jordan, MI), Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM, Amsterdam), PACT Zollverein (Essen, DE), and — in Los Angeles — Dog Star Festival, Machine Project, NEWTOWN (Pasadena Art Alliance) and the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS), LA Film Forum, EARMEAL broadcast. Lockie performs with Marshweed as well as experimental duo Spiders with Kalashnikovs, rebetiko folk group Galamatas, and folk/pop Desert Magic. She has premiered graphic score pieces with Southland Ensemble and with Dog Star Festival. She also co-curates and co-produces experimental music concerts at the house venue Casa Berenice Recordings.
In addition to Marshweed, Lockie has played and toured with her other bands Listing Ship and Leather Hyman as well as with international artists including Ty Segall, Cory Hanson, OCS, Mikal Cronin, Fun., Spiritualized, Scott Wieland (STP), Arthur Lee/LOVE, Eels, and various independent bands. She has performed both her own music and as a backing musician to internationally-known artists in a wide variety of musical venues that reflect the diversity of her musical output, from DIY spaces such as backyard tree house shows to venues such as the Royal Albert Hall and Letterman, to Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Jurassic Technology.
She earned an MFA (Performer/Composer) from California Institute of the Arts, studying with Sara Roberts and Wolfgang Von Schweinitz. She earned a BA from Occidental College (Comparative Literature-French/English). In addition to making her own music, she runs a private music studio and works with various child orchestras in the LA basin.
Suzanne Mathew | Visual Arts | Providence, RI
Suzanne Mathew is a licensed landscape architect with a diverse background in landscape architecture, architecture, and science. She is an Associate Professor and the Graduate Program Director in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she has taught for 13 years.
Mathew’s work centers on creating methods to measure and visualize the climate and environment. She uses a variety of approaches—artistic, theoretical, and scientific—to connect objective data with our sensory experiences of the environment. Her research includes developing interactive digital tools, field methods for capturing fleeting environmental conditions, and both hand-drawn and digital techniques for depicting spaces that evolve with the climate.
She has published and presented her research on temporally dynamic environments both in the U.S. and internationally. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Landscape Architecture and in books such as Fieldwork in Landscape Architecture: Methods, Actions, Tools (Horrigan and Oles), Representing Landscapes: Hybrid (Amoroso), and Innovations in Landscape Architecture (Anderson and Ortega).
Mathew has also participated in artist and research residencies at the MacDowell Artist Colony, the Siena Art Institute, the Swedish Landscape University, and Dumbarton Oaks.
Barbara Nerness | Composer | Stanford, CA
Barbara Nerness is an artist, researcher, and PhD candidate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), also pursuing a certificate in Composition. She also teaches Composer-Performer II and Building Applications for Music (Max/MSP) at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Her scientific research focuses on brain dynamics measured by EEG during music improvisation. She also writes, performs, and improvises multichannel music using biosignals, field recordings, guitar, and other objects. Inclusive practices and neurodiversity underpin her approach to design and subject material. Barbara enjoys collaborating with other artists, especially projects investigating surveillance and technological subversion. She has performed at venues throughout the Bay Area and Los Angeles, as well as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, ZKM, and the Sonic Arts Research Centre.
Gal Nissim | Media Arts | New York, NY
Gal Nissim is a New York-based, interdisciplinary artist and researcher investigating human-animal interactions. Nissim creates interactive works, often involving living organisms, that explore complex scientific themes. Using sound, video, sculpture, installation, and humor, she aims to help people rebuild our relationship with the living world.
Nissim’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Times Square, Pioneer Works, Central Park, New York Hall of Science, Artport Tel Aviv in Public Space, Science Gallery Detroit, GStreamer Conference (Berlin), among others.
Nissim has participated in residencies and fellowships with Artport, New Museum, Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE), Science Sandbox, The Clemente, CAMPO Garzon, NYFA, and Google’s Experimental Storytelling. Nissim was awarded the Young Artist Award (2022) by the Israel Ministry of Culture, Artis Residency grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Culture & Animals Foundation, and the Weizmann Institute of Science for outstanding young researchers.
Nissim received her Master’s degree from NYU’s ITP. She studied at Bezalel Academy of Art while earning her BSc, summa cum laude, in biology and cognitive science from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Nissim was an Innovator in Residence at Rutgers University (2022-2024), taught at Columbia University, ITP, Tisch, and is currently faculty at NYU’s Animal Studies, Environmental Studies.
Stephanie Rothenberg | Media Arts | Buffalo, NY
Stephanie Rothenberg is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of technology, economics and the life sciences. Using speculative design and visualization her artworks explore the physical and virtual systems of techno utopias. These are realized as interactive sculptures, dynamic networks, performances and installations. Themes in her work have examined the rise of digital labor and virtual economies with recent projects centered on the impact of climate change on ocean ecologies.
Her internationally recognized artworks have been represented at Eyebeam (US), Sundance Film Festival (US), House of Electronic Arts/HeK (CH), Transmediale (DE), and ZKM Center for Art & Media (DE) amongst others. Awards include a Creative Capital, Harpo Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts/NYSCA. She has participated in artist residencies such as ZK/U in Berlin, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace/LMCC (US), and Santa Fe Art Institute (US). Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been widely reviewed including Artforum and Hyperallergic. She is Professor in the Department of Art at University at Buffalo, SUNY where she teaches classes in design and emerging technologies and co-directs a collaborative design studio with local communities.
She is affiliate faculty in the university’s Coalesce Center for Biological Art and convener of the 2024 FEMeeting SisterLabs bringing together women in art, science and technology.
Helen Shewolfe Tseng | Media Arts | San Francisco, CA
Helen Shewolfe Tseng is an interdisciplinary artist and designer based in San Francisco, whose work engages with interspecies entanglement, folk spiritualities, experimental self-publishing, computational poetics, animist world-building, and trickster studies, and has taken the forms of works on paper, books and zines, games, rituals, divination, talks, installations, participatory works, browser-based works, wildlife observation, and combinations of the above. Coyotes and wild canids are a frequent motif and enduring obsession, as a narrative portal to examining land, myth, migration, power, and precarity.