Page contents
Areas of Focus
Artists
Edited: November 7, 2025
Heather Dewey-Hagborg
Heather Dewey-Hargborg, American artist and bio-hacker most knowned for the project Stranger Visions. Her recent work has been cesored to be showned in China. Ana Brígida for The New York Times

Heather Dewey-Hargborg, photo credit: Ana Brígida for The New York Times.

Pronouns
She/her
Date and place of birth
b. 1982, Philadelphia, PA
Current location
New York, NY
Year(s) of residency and/or fellowship
2012, Project Resident

Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an artist and biohacker interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions, in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed-up gum) collected in public places.

Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues, including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, Transmediale, the Walker Center for Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and PS1 MoMA. Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and SFMoMA, among others, and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Art Forum and Wired.

Heather has a Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a founding board member of Digital DNA, a European Research Council-funded project investigating the changing relationships between digital technologies, DNA, and evidence.

 

Stranger Visions

In Stranger Visions artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material collected in public places. Working with the traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey-Hagborg calls attention to the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of genetic surveillance.

From July 3rd- August 12th, 2012, visitors to the Eyebeam bookstore in Chelsea experienced the installation in person.

Read more about Stranger Visions here

 

Eyebeam models a new approach to artist-led creation for the public good; we are a non-profit that provides significant professional support and money to exceptional artists for the realization of important ideas that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Nobody else is doing this.

Donate today