Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and art. Her videos, installations, and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. Mayeri’s “animated documentaries” combine motion graphics and live-action, documentary and storytelling. Primate Cinema: Baboons as Friends (2007), is a reenactment of a primate social drama with human actors, produced in collaboration with primatologist Deborah Forster. Primate Cinema received a Semifinalist honor for the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge (sponsored by NSF and The Journal Science) and showed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark. Her chapter on artists’ experiments with science documentary is forthcoming in Tactical Biopolitcs, Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, editors (MIT Press). She programmed a DVD of videos by artists and scientists entitled Soft Science, which is distributed by Video Data Bank. Shown nationally and internationally, at Los Angeles Filmforum, ZKM, and P.S.1/MoMA, she is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College and a Guest Curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
