Joseph Dumit is an anthropologist of passions & performance, AI & games, brains & bodies, drugs and facts. Chair of Performance Studies, and Professor of Science & Technology Studies, and Anthropology at University of California Davis, he is author of Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans & Biomedical America (Princeton 2004), Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Duke 2012), and co-editor of Cyborgs & Citadels; Cyborg Babies; and Biomedicine as Culture. He has written articles about improvisation practices, art and science collaborations, neuroscience and play, irrational computers, patient experiences, difficult to define illnesses, and the history of medicine, and was the managing editor of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry for 10 years. He holds a B.A. from Rice University and a Ph.D. in the history of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
He is also Professor in Interdisciplinary Collaborations with the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC) at Aarhus University and a core member of EER (Experiencing, Experimenting, Reflecting), an art-science collaboration between IMC and Studio Olafur Eliasson developing multimedia installations for science literacy, social learning and togetherness. He is part of the Bikuben Vision Award 2021-24 “Yet, it Moves!” Art-Science-City with Copenhagen Contemporary Museum. He also collaborates with the Joint Improvisation Lab at CNRS Paris on virtual reality, art and and embodiment and is developing speculative science fiction workshops with the Healing Encounters Group (CNRS). He is currently obsessed with slownesses and lichen, substances and LLMs.