Biological Art

Students with petri dishes of yellow liquid.

Coalesce: Center for Biological Arts is a hybrid studio laboratory facility dedicated to enabling hands-on creative engagement with tools and technologies from the life sciences. Coalesce offers multiple short term BioArt Residencies to visiting artists each year.

Coalesce is within the Department of Art, while being a part of UB's Genome, Environment and Microbiome Community of Excellence (GEM).

Main Page for "Coalesce: Center for Biological Arts", on GEM's website

Working in intersecting spaces between art and life sciences, the Department of Art continues to push the boundaries of art making processes, asking the questions “What does it mean to design a living organism?” “What aspects of such an organism could be called an invention… or an artwork?” “How do we presently define life?” Headed up by award winning and most recently keynote lecturer at Artificial Lives, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, Paul Vanouse.

Student Works and Explorations

Faculty and Staff

  • Paul Vanouse
    4/8/20
    Professor, Program Head Emerging Practices, Director Coalesce, Emerging Practices. Paul Vanouse has been working in emerging media forms since 1990. Interdisciplinarity and impassioned amateurism guide his art practice. His electronic cinema, biological experiments, and interactive installations have been exhibited in over 20 countries and widely across the US.
  • Solon Morse
    2/24/24
    Coalesce Lab Manager. Solon Morse has a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from University at Buffalo and a Master’s in Ecology from the University of Illinois.