Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Keynote Speaker

Award-winning British artist
Writer
Lead author, “Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature” (2014)

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's Biography

Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist who examines humans fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, curatorial projects and writing, her work explores subjects including artificial intelligence, conservation, synthetic biology, evolution, and biodiversity, in her desire to investigate the human impulse to “better” the world.

Daisy has spent over ten years experimentally engaging with the field of synthetic biology, developing new roles for artists and designers. In doing so, she collaborates with scientists, artists, engineers, designers, policymakers and industry to understand the possibilities for technology and applications, and their potential implications. She is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014), and completed Better, her PhD by practice, at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) in 2017, interrogating how powerful dreams of “better” futures shape the things that get designed.

Daisy won the World Technology Award for design in 2011, the London Design Medal for Emerging Talent in 2012 and the Dezeen Changemaker Award 2019. Her pieces have been nominated twice for Designs of the Year (2011 and 2015), with Designing for the Sixth Extinction described as “romantic, dangerous… and everything else that inspires us to change and question the world”.

Today, Daisy exhibits all over the world, including at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of China, the Centre Pompidou, and the Royal Academy. Her famous works are held in private and museum permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and ZKM Karlsruhe.

She has done many talks on her work including TEDGlobal, PopTech, Design Indaba, and the New Yorker Tech Fest.

Daisy studied architecture at the University of Cambridge, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University and received her MA in Design Interactions from the RCA. She is based in London and launched her major new commission Pollinator Pathmaker for the Eden Project in 2021.