Annie Chen is a designer, scientist, and socio-technical researcher based in the United States.

Her work explores how environmental technologies encounter human and living systems across the climate transition. She develops artifacts and systems that make these encounters legible, enabling new forms of collective sense-making across science, technology, and community life.
After graduating from the Brown|RISD Dual Degree Program, she co-founded BEAM, a research-led creative studio for people & planet. She is also a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative and a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s design, culture, and tech incubator, in the Year 12 Creative Science cohort.

Her work has been supported by NASA Ames Research Center, MIT Media Lab, Science History Institute,
New York Foundation for the Arts, Brown University, EY Intelligent Realities Lab, and more.

CV


Selected Projects

🌀1 ASILOMAR
🌀2 TIDELANDS 2100
🌀3 CIVIC BIOTECHNOLOGY
🌀4 EATING THE WHOLE FISH
🌀5 NASA AMES
🌀6 BEACONS

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The Spirit of Asilomar

Video Essay
Monterey, CA
2025
Statement of Shared Stewardship

Co-Directors: Annie Chen & Zoe Lee [BEAM]
Partners: David Kong
Play Video

50 years after the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA that shaped modern biotechnology governance, we reconvened at Asilomar to rethink the future of biotechnology. As a Next Generation Fellow, I led a participatory workshop, co-developed the Statement of Shared Stewardship, and produced a video essay as a public-facing archive.

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Workshop Facillitation: Process Documentation



TIDELANDS 2100

Co-Director | Game, Film
Potter’s Pond, RI
2025Coastal Futures Beyond Displacement

Collaborators: Zoe Lee, Ellen Fritz, Ian Haut, Healey Koch
Partners: URI Dwell Lab, Jason Jarvis
Project Site

TIDELANDS is a game and film project developed with the URI DWELL Lab, focused on speculative coastal futures and climate adaptation. Through interactive storytelling and cinematic narrative, the project explores how communities might live, organize, and respond to rising seas.

Funders: Anonymous Was A Woman (NYFA), Rhode Island State Council of the Arts (RISCA)

Currently in production, TIDELANDS will move into community workshops in 2026 with partners including the Tomaquag Museum, URI, and the Providence Resilience Project. The project is designed for both local impact and global dialogue, with plans to present from Rhode Island planning forums to the UN Climate Conference (COP) in 2028.
Civic Biotechnology

Researcher
MIT Media Lab
2026Growing Community Power in Conservation

Team: Annie Chen, Dr. David S. Kong, Zoe Lee, Zion Michael
Partners: Harvard Kennedy School, Revive & Restore (+more)
Read More
As coral reefs rapidly die in warming waters, new biotechnologies are racing to save them — from probiotics to gene-edited corals. But most never leave the lab. Without ways to partner with the communities who permit and steward reef ecosystems, critical interventions stall before they reach the ocean.

With the MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative, we developed a Sociotechnical Toolkit for listening, mapping relationships, and organizing collective action in conservation. To share these methods broadly, we built Civic Biotechnology — a live site that makes the tools accessible to the scientific community and adaptable for real-world use. More than a manual, it’s a resource for integrating trust-building into research and deployment.

Civic Biotechnology will launch online in winter 2025, offering scientists an open-access platform for applying these methods in their own work. Field deployment begins in Jamaica and Micronesia in 2026, with continued development through the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) to link local practice with global governance.

Full list of partners: Revive & Restore, Parley for the Oceans, Harvard Kennedy School, Practicing Democracy Project, Coral Gardeners, One People One Reef, Alligator Head Foundation.
EATING THE WHOLE FISH

Creative Direction, Writing
Providence, RI
2025Publication

Collaborators: Kayla Feng, Zoe Lee
Partners: Eating with the Ecosystem
200 pp. Swiss Bound

Eating the Whole Fish is a 200-page illustrated book, produced with Eating with the Ecosystem, exploring sustainable seafood, local fisheries, and underutilized species through recipes and visual storytelling.

Funders: Playbook Fund, Interlace Grant Fund

Pre-orders for Eating the Whole Fish open this September, with the full release in November 2026. Launch events will take place in Providence and NYC, in partnership with NEW INC, the New Museum’s art and culture incubator.
NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER

Lead Researcher
Ames, CA | Providence, RI
2020-2023Biomimetic Swarms for Remote Sensing

PI: Dr. Lynn Rothschild
NASA Ames Research Center, Brown University
AbSciCon Abstract Innovation Proposal

Speculative proposal & series of artifacts developed at NASA Ames for swarm-based aerial platforms to detect life on and off earth. Deep biomimetic inspiration from the dispersion strategies and mechanisms of seed pods. In our search for life off earth, can we look to life on earth?


Inspired by the low-risk, high quantity approach that seed pods take to passive flight, this project explores a swarm-based, biomimetic approach to in situ remote sensing of atmospheres for both on and off-Earth applications. This novel approach, which draws from the dispersion strategy of the dandelion and maple seed to inform the design of miniature aerial platforms, addresses the exploratory platform gap between the current models of in situ measurement and remote satellite sensing, and has the potential to mitigate current shortcomings of both approaches. 

Exceptionally lightweight, low-cost, and low-risk, this concept has the potential to be deployed in a range of applications that are either inefficient or impossible with current remote sensing techniques– from continuous vertical profiling of the transition from space to Earth’s upper atmosphere, to the detection of biological components and the modeling of wind patterns in off-Earth atmospheres like Venus and Mars.
BEACONS

Designer
Providence, RI | NYC
2025Installation

Collaborators: Zoe Lee, SPOLIA, Luke Henderson
Curator: Remina Greenfield
Exhibition: NEW INC Demo Festival, WSA NYC

BEACONS (2025) is an environmental installation translating deep-sea data from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone into immersive sound and light. Exhibited at New Museum’s DEMO Festival, the work uses sculptural speakers to emit frequencies tied to ecological change, allowing audiences to experience an otherwise inaccessible ecosystem. By transmitting environmental signals rather than representing them, BEACONS reframes the deep sea as a fragile, interconnected world under increasing pressure from extraction.





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