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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  ( \                 / )    ( \ )               ( / )   ( ) (  illustrations  ) ( )  ( / )               ( \ )     ( /                 \ )        (_.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸_)


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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.

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