User:Alexsausa/sandbox

= Marta de Menezes =

Biography
Marta de Menezes is a Portuguese artist (b. Lisbon, 1975) with a degree in Fine Arts by the University in Lisbon, a MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture by the University of Oxford, and a PhD candidate at the University of Leide. She is currently the artistic director of Ecotopia, an experiment art laboratory in Lisbon, and the director of Cultivamos Cultural in the south of Portugal.

Artwork
The work of de Menezes explores the intersection between art and biology, working in research laboratories demonstrating that new biological technologies can be used as new art medium.

In 1999, de Menezes created her first biological artwork (Nature?) by modifying the wing patterns of live butterflies. Since then, she has diverse biological techniques such as:


 * Functional MRI of the brain to create portraits where the mind can be visualized (Functional Portraits, 2002)
 * Fluorescent DNA probes to create micro-sculptures in human cell nuclei (nucleArt, 2002)
 * Sculptures made of proteins (Proteic Portrait, 2002-2007), DNA (Innercloud, 2003; The Family, 2004) or incorporating live neurons (Tree of Knowledge, 2005) or bacteria (Decon, 2007)