Team:SVA-NYC/Team

SVA-NYC

Team

Andrew Cziraki

School of Visual Arts

Andrew Jozseph Cziraki is a Manhattan based artist currently earning his BFA at SVA. Previously he constructed visual art in a traditional manor, but once attending SVA he began transitioning into many different mediums such as, sound, video, scientific experimentation and technological art. His work focuses on a theme of the imprints of humanity left on physical or psychological environments. These themes relate to sub-conscious and conscious excrement discarded by the human organism. Another interest he engages in is the presence of natural hallucinations associated to visual or oral phenomenon.

Martica Apicella

School of Visual Arts

Arthur Janecek

School of Visual Arts

Arthur Janecek is a BFA Illustration student at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. He has a strong passion for plants and can be found anywhere green things congregate, be they in test tubes, under grow lights, or forests. With plans to study Botanical Illustration, Arthur has a particular interest in unusual plants and their discovery, ecology, and conservation through tissue culture techniques. In addition to setting up a DIY tissue culture lab, he is currently co-writing and illustrating a webcomic.

Ash Conrad

School of Visual Arts

She is a recent graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with degrees in both Studio Art and Biology. During her four years at UNC, she worked in the Lineberger Cancer Center as a lab technician in the Blood Born Pathogen Lab as well as the Tissue Culture Facility. She specializes in mammalian cell biology, and wants to pursue a degree in Medical Illustration. This is her second summer working in the SVA BioArt lab, and during this project will be creating designs for the finalized product while also assisting in some molecular techniques.

Beckett Gookin

CU Boulder

I am currently finishing my final year at CU Boulder, for a major in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and a minor in Art History. For the SVA iGEM team: my focus is the transformation of various biobrick parts into our chassises, their subsequent mini-prepping, and ultimately performing restriction digests and ligations to form our biological devices. I am also in charge of logging all of the wet-lab notes.

Darya Warner

School of Visual Arts

Darya Warner came to US from Belarus in 2001 and was determined to pursue her dream of being an artist. Her work revolves around the complexity of nature and global environmental consciousness, in which living organisms are the quintessential part of Darya's ideas. Through bio-processing and collaboration with living matter (mycelium, bioluminescent algae, glowing E.Coli and other ) combined with usage of modern technologies (CNC machines) Darya creates interactive installations, visual displays, and sculptures to engage the viewer into becoming more aware of the world around us and push to rethink his/her place as a ‘sapiens’ part of Earth’s Complex.

Heather Appleby

School of Visual Arts

Heather Appleby graduated with a BFA from the School of Visuals Arts in 2010 and is currently pursuing a degree in Biotechnology at CUNY City College. As an art student, her work focused on scientific literature surrounding genetic modification and her current research interests lie in genetics and molecular biology. She most recently worked as a Database Assistant in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History where she learned how to use R to analyze large specimen data sets. She is excited to be back at SVA as a part of the iGEM team.

Jennifer Nguyen

School of Visual Arts

Jennifer Nguyen is a recent graduate of School of Visual Arts in New York City. She studied at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2014. In 2015, Jennifer received a BFA with a concentration in Fine Arts. Originally having painting as her medium of choice, Jennifer began to realize her passion for not only sculptural work, but interactive and installation work as well. Finding herself having a deep and visceral connection with nature and its organic qualities, Jennifer has dove head first into the world of Bio Art. By learning to incorporate natural and organic materials such as greenery and water, she is able push her conceptual ideas even further. She is currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY.

Mike Falk

School of Visual Arts

Mike Falk has a strong interest in art, design, education, and the communities built around them. He also has a strong affinity for music, video games, and bananas. Mike earned a BFA in Sculpture at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and a Masters of Industrial Design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He is currently working and teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Sebastion Cocioba

School of Visual Arts

Biology undergrad, CEO & Founder at New York Botanics, LLC, an ornamental plant genetic engineering start-up located in New York City. He is also an independent researcher for the education-oriented biotech non-profit, Binomica Labs. His research focuses on the nutritional requirements of life and the metabolic basis of speciation as well as the development of open source hardware for use in the molecular biology setting both formal and amateur.

Shane Boddington

School of Visual Arts

Shane Boddington (born April 8th, 1986) is a conceptual artist working at the intersection of art and science. He works in a variety of mediums ranging from BioArt and Virtual Reality to traditional oil painting and prints to sculpture. His work questions what is real and what is synthetic in social, political and cultural practices and what it is to be human in the post-information age revolution he terms the artificial age.

Steph Mantis

School of Visual Arts

Steph Mantis studied Industrial Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY as well as glass design at the Danish Design School in Copenhagen and Bornholm, Denmark. She is currently based in Brooklyn and runs her eponymous design studio that focuses on product and exhibition design. Her product design work focuses on highlighting nostalgia and a sense of play in everyday objects, and her exhibition design work is often connected to food, most notably pizza expert Scott Weiner and his Guinness World Record breaking collection of pizza boxes. Most recently she has been experimenting with microscopy photography through SVA’s Nat Lab.

Tarah Rhoda

School of Visual Arts

Tarah Rhoda received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in NYC and also studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She is currently based in Brooklyn and working in the SVA Bioart lab, researching live materials and exploring the intersection of art, science and technology. Her artwork focuses on the body as a miniature world- one with landscapes, weather, and systems of self maintenance that produce a spectrum of minerals and artifacts. She most recently attended a bio-safety in the laboratory bootcamp in Atlantic City.

Victor Taboada

School of Visual Arts

Currently enrolled as an Undergraduate Fine arts student, interested in the emerging relationship of natural processes and their synthetic binary counter parts. Art work explores the symmetric relationships between the natural world of patterns and the unconscious implementation of such patterns in our modern technologies. Recent work involves self sustaining environments as well as around the clock monitoring of such environments all using DIY components.

Instructors

Suzanne Anker

School of Visual Arts

Suzanne Anker is a pioneer in Bio Art working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, including the JP Getty Museum, the Pera Museum in Istanbul, and the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and the SVA Bio Art Laboratory.

Advisors

Joseph DeGiorgis

The Marine Biological Laboratory

Joe graduated with a bachelors’ degree in Oceanography and Marine Ecology from the Florida Institute of Technology and worked as a SCUBA diver for the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He spent time at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and at Harvard Medical School before obtaining a PhD in Neuroscience from Brown University. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health and is now a Professor of Biology at Providence College and Adjunct Faculty in the MBL Cellular Dynamics Program. Throughout his academic career Joe has been interested in imaging using a wide variety of techniques from underwater photography to light and electron microscopy. Joe has taken his camera and dive gear around the world and has photographed the shipwrecks of Truk Lagoon, the sharks of Palau, the coral walls of Cozumel, and the coral reefs of Thailand, among others. His research focuses on the function of Alzheimer’s proteins and uses the squid giant axon as a model system. His work as been published in magazine articles and on the covers of scientific journals including; Molecular Biology of the Cell and Traffic. Currently, Joe is preparing for a year at sea capturing images of the organisms along Darwin’s Voyage through microscopes, telescopes, and the macro lens.

Oliver Medvedik

Genspace

Open source synthetic biologist and co-founder of Genspace, a first of its kind community biolab, Oliver Medvedik earned his Ph.D. at Harvard Medical School, in the Biomedical and Biological Sciences program. As part of his doctoral work he has used single-celled budding yeast as a model system to map the genetic pathways that underlie the processes of aging in more complex organisms, such as humans. Prior to arriving in Boston for his doctoral studies, he has lived most of his life in New York City. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in biology from Hunter College, City University of New York. Since graduating from Harvard, he has worked as a biotechnology consultant, taught molecular biology to numerous undergraduates at Harvard University and mentored two of Harvard’s teams for the international genetically engineered machines competition (IGEM) held annually at M.I.T.

Back to top