AAHVS Visiting Artist Lecture Series – WhiteFeather Hunter “Biofabrication as Feminist Craft: Weaving Life at the Cellular Scale”

AAHVS Visiting Artist Lecture Series featuring WhiteFeather Hunter "Biofabrication as Feminist Craft: Weaving Life at the Cellular Scale"

Tuesday, December 2, 2025, 4:30 - 6:00 PM, A266 Smith Warehouse, Bay 10, Duke University

This talk surveys Dr. WhiteFeather Hunter’s artistic research investigating biofabrication as a feminist craft practice. Drawing on frameworks from feminist technoscience, her work reimagines tissue engineering, 3D bioprinting, and microbial dyeing as critical, embodied acts of making. Projects such as Sentient Clit: The Pussification of Biotech and IMARA: Interstitial Machine for Aggregate Reparative Anatomies reframe the laboratory as a site of care, resistance, and material storytelling. Through these works and others, Hunter explores the intersections of reproductive politics, interspecies symbiosis, and speculative worldbuilding, questioning the human as a fixed category and destabilizing social codes that underpin biotechnological systems. Her research-creation practice challenges extractive narratives of science by foregrounding bodily autonomy, repair, and relationality as guiding principles shaping the biopolitics of making with vital agents.

 
Dr. WhiteFeather Hunter is an internationally recognized Canadian artist-researcher working at the intersections of feminist technoscience, bioart, and craft. She holds a PhD in Biological Art from SymbioticA, University of Western Australia, and is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.  She exhibits and lectures internationally, contributing to dialogues on art, biotechnology, and material feminism.