People

Richard Pell works at the intersections of science, engineering, and culture. He has worked in a variety of electronic media from documentary video to robotics to bioart to museum exhibition. He is the founder and director of the Center for PostNatural History (CPNH), an organization dedicated to the collection and exposition of life-forms that have been intentionally and heritably altered through domestication, selective breeding, tissue culture or genetic engineering. The CPNH operates a permanent museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and produces traveling exhibitions that have appeared in science and art museums throughout Europe and the United States, including being the subject of a major exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. The CPNH has appeared in publications including National Geographic, Nature Magazine, American Scientist, Popular Science, New Scientist, The Guardian and Wired. The CPNH was awarded a Rockefeller New Media fellowship, a Creative Capital fellowship, a Smithsonian artist research fellowship, and major financial support support from Waag Society and the Kindle Project. Pell is also a co-founder of the internationally acclaimed art and engineering collective, the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA). The IAA has exhibited works at the ZKM, Ars Electronica, Victoria & Albert Museum and Mass MoCA. Richard Pell is an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2016 he was awarded the Pittsburgh Artist of the Year.