Angelo Vermeulen

Angelo Vermeulen (born 1971, Sint Niklaas) is a Belgian space systems researcher, biologist and artist. In 2009 he co-founded SEADS (Space Ecologies Art and Designs), an international transdisciplinary collective of artists, scientists, engineers, and activists Its goal is to reshape the future through critical inquiry and hands-on experimentation. Biomodd is one of their most well-known art projects and consists of a worldwide series of co-created interactive art installations in which computers coexist with internal living ecosystems. For the last ten years, he has been collaborating with the European Space Agency’s MELiSSA program on biological life support for space and in 2013 he was crew commander of one of the NASA-funded HI-SEAS Mars mission simulations in Hawai'i. Currently, he works at Delft University of Technology on advanced concepts for interstellar exploration. His work proposes a bio-inspired design approach to deal with the unpredictability inherent to interstellar travel. He is a Senior TED Fellow and was selected in 2017 as one of the Top 5 Tech Pioneers from Belgium by the newspaper De Tijd.

In 1998 Vermeulen completed his PhD on mouthpart deformities in non-biting midge larvae at the biology department of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. In that same year he also graduated from the Municipal Academy of Fine Arts in Leuven, where he studied photography. Vermeulen left Belgium to work in London as a photographer together with Nick Waplington.

After his return to Belgium in 2001, he attended a two-year post-academic course at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Belgium. This became the starting point of an exploration to try and find out how biology and ecological processes can interact in art and how to materialize them as art installations.

From 2011 to 2012 he was a member of the European Space Agency Topical Team Arts & Science (ETTAS) In 2012 he was a Michael Kalil Endowment for Smart Design Fellow at Parsons in New York. He also held positions at LUCA School of Visual Arts in Ghent (Belgium) and Die Angewandte in Vienna (Austria) and has been (guest) faculty at universities across Europe, the US, and Southeast Asia. In 2011 Vermeulen started research on advanced concepts for interstellar exploration at Systems Engineering and Simulation at Delft University of Technology.