Charissa N. Terranova is an environmental humanist reframing the history of art and architecture in the age of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch of human-driven climate change. She researches the role of nature, biology, and biotechnology in the history of art and design. She is Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Chair in Art and Aesthetic Studies and Professor of Art and Architectural History in the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas where she teaches courses on past and present avant-gardes, modern architecture, and contemporary bio-art, interspecies art, and art-science eco-theory. ​

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Terranova's latest book Organic Modernism: from the British Bauhaus to Cybernetics (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2024) is an interdisciplinary study of "organicism," the age-old anti-reductionist philosophy maintaining the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The book, which is open access and free of charge, uses the historical framework of “organic modernism” to explore the braiding of culture and science in twentieth-century art and architecture. It follows the red thread of organicism through a host of manifestations in the UK, including modern architecture, surrealism, socialism, the welfare state, epigenetics, robotic art and design, and cybernetics in art. A sequel to Terranova's Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (Bloomsbury, 2022 [2016]), Organic Modernism reveals the biological roots of cybernetics in the British context. 

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Terranova may be reached through university email: terranova@utdallas.edu.

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