He is an artist, researcher and curator whose pioneering work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project which he established with Ionat Zurr in 1996 is considered a leading biological art project.

 

In 2000 he founded SymbioticA, an artistic research centre housed within the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia. Under Oron’s leadership SymbioticA has gone on to win the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art (2007) and became a Centre for Excellence in 2008. Catts’ interest is life, more specifically the shifting relations and perceptions of life in the light of new knowledge and it application.

 

Often working in collaboration with other artists (mainly Ionat Zurr) and scientists, Catts have developed a body of work that speak volumes about the need to for new cultural articulation of evolving concepts of life. Oron was a Research Fellow in Harvard Medical School and a visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University.

 

He is currently the Director of SymbioticA, a Visiting Professor of Design Interaction, Royal College of Arts, London, and a Visiting Researcher/consultant at Aalto University’s Future Art Base, Helsinki. Catts’ ideas and projects reach beyond the confines of art; his work is often cited as inspiration to diverse areas such as new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction, and food.

 

www.tcaproject.org