Biography
Ayah Bdeir is an artist, engineer and interaction designer. She graduated from the MIT Media Lab with a Masters of Media Arts and Sciences after studying Computer & Communication Engineering and Sociology in the American University of Beirut.
She has worked as a researcher and interaction designer in Lebanon and New York, in artist spaces and design firms, with a brief interruption to work in a financial services firm in New York. Her work spans a range of mediums including interactive installations, electronic fashion, gadgets and active furniture, and has been exhibited in conferences, festivals and galleries in Amsterdam, Paris, London, New York, Rhode Island, Boston, Chicago, Beirut, and Amman.
With an upbringing between Lebanon, Canada and the United States, Ayah’s work uses technology to look at cross cultural dialogue and media representation of the Middle East and its identities. She has taught classes at the Graduate level at NYU, Parsons School of Design and MIT, including a class entitled “Technology as Identity”, focusing on deliberate and subconscious representations of identity through new media. She has lectured extensively and taught numerous workshops to get non-engineers interested in producing work with science and technology, including a focus on young girls, artists and designers.
Her work has been in numerous media outlets such as the New York Times, the New York Post, the Village Voice, ID Magazine, Make Magazine, Engadget and Core77. She has been featured in Art Asia Pacific Magazine, Elle Orientale, and Gossip Magazine.
Ayah is now a senior artist fellow at Eyebeam, a gallery for art and technology in Chelsea, New York, where she helps set strategy for the gallery and originate public programs alongside the program manager and president of Eyebeam.
Ayah lives in New York and is the pricipal of art&d studio for creative technologies, New York.
Contact
ayah AT ayahbdeir DOT com
+617 372 3729
540 W. 21st Street, (between 10th and 11th Avenues)
New York, NY 10011
Resume
Please click here to view.
Portrait
Photo by Mark Mahaney
