Beatriz da Costa
| Beatriz da Costa | |
|---|---|
Where 2.0, San Jose, 2007
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|
| Born |
June 11, 1974 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | December 27, 2012 (aged 38) New York, New York, U.S.A. |
| Nationality | German |
Beatriz da Costa (June 11, 1974 – December 27, 2012) was an interdisciplinary artist known for her work at the intersection of contemporary art, science, engineering, and politics. Her projects took the form of public interventions and workshops, conceptual tool building, and critical writing.
Laura Gabriela Beatriz Noronha da Costa (Beatriz da Costa) was born in Berlin, Germany. Raised and educated in Ahrensburg in northern Germany, da Costa moved to southern France in 1995 to study art at the École supérieure d’art, Aix-en-Provence, and in 1999 came to the United States, where she became a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. While at CMU, da Costa served as both an associate researcher and courtesy faculty.
After graduating in 2001, she taught briefly at Chatham College and as a visiting assistant professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo. In 2003 she took a joint appointment as assistant professor in the Department of Studio Art and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.
Da Costa was brought to UC Irvine as a founding member of the Arts Computation, Engineering (ACE) graduate program, an interdisciplinary program housed between the schools of engineering, computer science, and arts. She was also affiliate faculty in the Informatics Department, as well as in the Culture and Theory Ph.D. program. In 2007, after receiving tenure at UC Irvine, she began work on a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, where the feminist scholar Donna Haraway was her chief mentor.
Da Costa battled cancer several times during her life, first at the age of 14 and then again when her cancer recurred at 19 and 21. In 2009, Da Costa was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast cancer, which she fought until dying on December 27, 2012.
Beatriz da Costa was a co-founder with Jaime Schulte and Brooke Singer of Preemptive Media, and a former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). She also created work on her own, with a special interest in the intersections of art, science, engineering, and politics. Da Costa's artwork took whatever form served it best, including robotics, micro-electronics, installation, sculpture, performance, interactivity, net art, photography, and video. She experimented with the use of biological materials and organisms in her artistic interventions and was intent on using these interspecies projects to promote the responsible use of natural resources and environmental sustainability. Da Costa and her collaborators frequently engaged the public by running workshops that translated challenging new technical and scientific developments into something accessible to a more general public.
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