Adam Zaretsky (b.1968, Bellevue, NYC, USA)
Artist, performer, researcher, art theorist. Graduated with an MFA in Art and Technology in 1999 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a research associate for two years at the Arnold Demain Laboratory for Microbiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA). Zaretsky now practices bio art, including embryology and parasitology, using a wide range of modern media-strategies and technologies in his works. He also focuses on legal, ethical and social implications of some of the newer biotechnological materials and methods, i.e.: Molecular Biology, ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology], and Transgenic Protocols. Zaretsky taught an experimental Art and Biology class called VivoArts at San Francisco State University, Exploratorium (San Francisco), SymbioticA at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology of the University of Western Australia (Perth, Australia) and the Department of Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, New York, USA). While researching, Zaretsky works on various forms of bio art, focusing on installations with the environment, cookery (radical nutrition) and performative animalism as well as on laboratory experiments of body manipulation. He is the author of several scientific and artistic publications and molecular biology projects, including Workhorse Zoo – realized in collaboration with Julia Reodica for the show Unmediated Vision at the Salina Art Center (Kansas, 2002). In 2007, he taught bio arts – focusing on transgenic embryological sculpture – as a guest of The Arts and Genomics Centre at Leiden University Honors Program (the Netherlands). Zaretsky is currently a PhD candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, New York, USA).