Nefeli Manoudaki is an architect and creative technologist working toward a biodigital architecture. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Marcos Novak's transLAB, and Co-Founder of Metaesthetica, a research-driven design collective operating at the convergence of computer science, media architecture, and engineering. Previously, she served as a researcher at the TUC TIE Lab in Greece, contributing to large-scale, nationally recognized projects.
Her practice searches for the signals living systems already carry, the activity of brain organoids, the growth patterns of mycelium, and translates them into computational process: agent-based simulation, generative form, multisensory installation. The work moves across scales, from full-room environments down to material and object-level experiments, and she's increasingly drawn to folding biological materials directly into her fabrication processes, letting the biological and the computational shape each other.
She is an artist-in-residence at SBCAST (Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science & Technology). Her research has been published in venues including IJAC, IEEE VISAP, and SIGGRAPH, and her work has been exhibited at ISEA, Ars Electronica, the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, CURRENTS NEW MEDIA, IEEE VISAP, LOAD Gallery Barcelona, and the AI Art Biennale, with recognition from AI Art Magazine. She also serves as Co-Artistic Director and Lead for Urban Projection Mappings at Brave New Work, a conference featuring works by internationally recognized media artists in public spaces.