Visiting Artist Lecture: Rachel Mayeri

The School of Art + Art History presents the Visiting Artist Lecture Series.

Join us for an artist talk and Q&A with Rachel Mayeri on Tuesday, October 20 at 6:15 p.m. in Fine Arts B (FAB) 103.

Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of art and science, educated at Brown University and University of California, San Diego. Her videos, installations and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. She is known for her multi-year series of artworks about nonhuman primates entitled Primate Cinema. The first, “Baboons as Friends,” was created in collaboration with primatologist Deborah Forster and shown at the Mill Valley Film Festival in California, Abandon Normal Devices in Liverpool and Art Laboratory Berlin. Commissioned by Arts Catalyst, she designed a film expressly for chimpanzees. The film, called “Apes as Family,” subsequently exhibited at Sundance, Berlinale, Ars Electronica and Microwave Media Art Festival in Hong Kong. As part of Getty’s 2024 PST Art: Art & Science Collide, she created a three-channel video installation at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, “R/P FLIP R.I.P.,” about a Cold War research vessel built to rotate 90 degrees. As a Guest Curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, she designed the permanent kinetic exhibition “Miracles and Disasters in Renaissance and Baroque Theater.” 

A pioneer in art-science, Mayeri’s projects are featured in books such as Interspecies: Art, Science, and the Animal (2024); The Art-Science Symbiosis (Springer 2024); and The Routledge Companion of Biology in Art and Architecture (2017). She is the recipient of numerous accolades and grants including the Major Arts Award from Wellcome Trust and a Creative Capital Media Grant, and has held residencies at Djerassi, Banff New Media Institute and the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA). She is currently Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College, where she teaches courses in Animal Media Studies, Nonhuman Media Art and Art & Biology.