Biography Libby Heaney
Dr. Libby Heaney is an award-winning visual artist with a PhD & professional research background in Quantum Information Science. She is widely known as the first artist to work with quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium.
Heaney’s practice explores inherently queer, non-local, and hybrid concepts from quantum science to disrupt binary categories and hierarchies and foster radical interconnectedness. Her works combine diverse mediums such as performance, moving image, glass, and watercolour with cutting-edge technologies including machine learning, game engines, and quantum computing, entangling interior landscapes with the impact of the exterior realm.
Crucially, Heaney’s works continuously seek to expand the possibilities of the individual and the collective through the magic of quantum, transcending capitalist uses of technology. Through the ambivalent mechanisms and logic of quantum, Heaney creates new non-linear modes of affective storytelling, blurring fact and fiction and embracing both narrative and intuitive visceral embodied experiences.
As a scientist, Heaney worked at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore, publishing physics papers in top peer-reviewed journals. She was the recipient of the Institute of Physics's Very Early Career Woman in Physics award. In 2015, Heaney graduated from Central St. Martins, London, with a focus on AI and kinetic sculpture.
Since then, Heaney has exhibited at major institutions and museums in the UK and internationally, such as Ars Electronica, Linz; Tate Modern, London; V&A Museum, London. Her significant solo exhibitions and performances include Quantum Soup, HEK, Basel; Heartbreak and Magic, Somerset House, London; The Evolution of Ent-: QX, arebyte Gallery, London; The Whole Earth Chanting, Sonar Festival, Barcelona; CASCADE, Southbank Centre, London; and Ent-, LAS Art Foundation, Berlin. 2022, Heaney won the Lumen Prize and the Falling Walls Art & Science award.