Adriana Knouf
Adriana Knouf, PhD (she/her/hers, sie/hir/hirs) works as an artist, writer, and xenologist. She engages with topics such as wet media, space art, satellites, radio transmission, non-human encounters, drone flight, queer and trans futurities, machine learning, the voice, and papermaking. She is the Founding Facilitator of the tranxxeno lab, a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements amongst entities trans and xeno. Adriana is formerly an Assistant Professor of Art + Design at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA, previously taught at Wellesley College and Ithaca College, and is currently a Practice Tutor at St Jost School of Art and Design. Adriana is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Adriana is the author of How Noise Matters to Finance (2016) and numerous other journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers dealing with topics as varied as bioart, queer and trans existences, papermaking and electronics, weird temporalities, radio, and surveillance. She has recently completed a text "Fragments of Xenology" that sets out her own approach to "xenology", or the study, analysis, and development of the xeno (strange, alien, other). Adriana writes extensively about xenology in the context of contemporary theory, poetics, and artistic practice.
Adriana has been selected for a number of prestigious residencies, including an Art4Med/3Package Deal residency at Waag in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; a Biofriction residency at Kapelica Gallery and Kersnikova Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia; participation in Field_Notes supported by the Bioart Society, Helsinki, Finland; and a project at the Wave Farm in Acra, NY, USA. Her research has been funded by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation (US) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Past work has been recognized by a number of awards, including an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (2021), an Honorary Mention from the Science Fiction Research Association's Innovative Research Award, a prize winner in The Lake's Works for Radio #4 (2020), an Honorary Mention by Prix Ars Electronica in [the next idea] category (2005), the Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) for her dissertation (2013) and master's thesis (2008), a memefest Award of Distinction (2008), and a special transmediale "Online Highlight" (2009). She has presented her research and projects at national and international conferences and festivals such as transmediale (DE); Piksel (NO); ISEA (SG, CA); DIY Citizenship (CA); TEI (JP); CHI; CAA; Tuning Speculation; the Society for Literature, Science and Art (SLSA); and the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S). Additionally, her work has been discussed in print and online media, including Makery.info, Motherboard, The Creator's Project, ID Magazine, the Boston Globe, CNN, Slashdot, and Afterimage.
Adriana has a PhD in Information Science from Cornell University, an SM in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BS in Engineering and Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology.