Anna Dumitriu is a Brighton-based contemporary artist best known for her work in bio-art. Her practice encompasses installations, interventions and performances, often incorporating diverse materials such as bacteria, robotics, digital projections and embroidery, Dumitriu seeks to blur the boundaries between the arts and the sciences.

Dumitriu is founder and Director of the Institute of Unnecessary Research and lead artist on the "Trust me, I'm an artist: towards an ethics of art/science collaboration" project working with the Waag Society in Amsterdam. She has written extensively on the notion of the "bacterial sublime".

Is science our new key to the sublime?

Nature has always been one of the most powerful ways of accessing the sublime. Edmund Burke, who published his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful as a young man in 1757 describes its effects as: “the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”