Brandon Ballengée creates transdisciplinary artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research.
Brandon Ballengée is an artist and biologist that creates transdisciplinary artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research into amphibians, birds, fish and insect species found in today’s preternatural environments. Underlying his practice is a systemic methodology, which posits art practice as a means of realizing research science, and vice-versa. Inherent to this working method is an impetus for “ecosystem activism” implemented through participatory biology field investigations and laboratory programs that stress public involvement. Since 1996 Ballengée’s central primary scientific research and much of his art has focused on the occurrence of developmental deformities and population declines among amphibians and other cold-blooded vertebrates. For the past three years Ballengée has been researching missing species of Gulf of Mexico fishes following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil spill.
Brandon Ballengée creates transdisciplinary artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research. Ballengée’s art has been exhibited internationally in over 20 countries and in the summer of 2013 the first career survey of his work debuted at the Château de Charamarande (Essonne, France), which travelled to the Museum Het Domein (Sittard, Netherlands) in 2014. In the fall of 2016 the first United States mid-career retrospective of his work opened at the University of Wyoming Art Museum (Laramie, Wyoming). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2017) and Awards from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (2015, 2016). He holds a Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Art and Biology from the University of Plymouth (England). Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) studying the impact of the 2010 oil spill on Gulf of Mexico fish species.
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