Kate Nichols

Oakland-based artist Kate Nichols synthesizes nanoparticles to mimic structurally colored animals, uses CRISPR-Cas9 to “paint” with genes, grows artificial skin from microorganisms, and makes her own paints following fifteenth-century recipes. The long tradition of painters as material innovators inspired Nichols to become the first artist-in-residence in the Alivisatos Lab, a nanoscience laboratory at UC Berkeley. Following this, Nichols was named a Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute, a Jacob K. Javits Fellow, and a TED Fellow. Her artwork has been featured on the cover of the journal Nature, in the Stavanger Kunstmuseum in Norway, and in The Leonardo Museum’s permanent collection. Nichols has been a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, and an artist-in-residence at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Stochastic Labs, and the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley. She is currently creating paintings inspired by her experiments with CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology and working on a children’s picture book about the evolution of eyes.