"A Universe of Its Own" Lolo Ostia on Light & Living Materials

Lolo Ostia is an artist and longtime Genspace member. Right now, she’s having a moment: biennials, an inaugural Columbia fellowship, and a first-prize film. 

Lolo Ostia has spent the last two years moving from one thing to the next: the Florence Biennale, the Havana Biennial, the New York Latin American Art Triennial, The Videoakt Biennial and a fellowship at Columbia's Brown Institute, resulting in a film that just took first prize of the Pangue Festival de Videoarte.

"For the longest time I wasn't sharing any of my bio art material research, because I didn't feel like it was ready," she says. "I wanted to develop a strong conceptual body of work. For me it has to be conceptually rich and aesthetically pleasing. I come from photography and fashion, so I will always lean towards balance and beauty."

When we asked her what she thought helped her get to this moment, she mentioned her patience. "It's important to take the time to build a craft," she says. "People are in a rush, a serious art career doesn't happen overnight. If you look back at my photography work, even from fourteen years ago, it's all connected to what I'm doing now."

The thread that runs through all of this is light. "I tell people I'm an artist, my background is photography, so I was always really interested in light," she says. 

Before biomaterials, she built large video installations out of acrylic, hauling seven-foot panels across the city and getting them cut on Canal Street. "I felt like every time I went, I was choking on microplastic. And I'd be carrying these panels, moving apartments, wondering, where is this acrylic going to be after I'm gone?"

"That's how I started getting into biomaterials. I thought, imagine if it can biodegrade, how powerful that is. You have this immersive installation with sound and smell, and then it's gone. It just dissolves." She figured she could "biohack any material." That's how she ended up at Genspace.

"I really enjoy working in the lab and seeing this bacteria grow. This universe of its own."

Working with the living also means working with the dying. "I'm really interested in biodegradability. When you work with a living organism, death becomes part of it." She remembers when a contaminated kombucha SCOBY (or symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) felt like a small grief. "I would suffer immensely. Decay can be a beautiful process. It makes the art an experience rather than just an object."

That philosophy is most apparent in her works with bioluminescent algae. For NYCxDesign Week, Ostia built a lamp from dinoflagellates, Pyrocystis fusiformis, that she grew in her apartment. The base was made from a bioplastic she developed out of algae collected at the beach.

"I had to invert their circadian rhythm. I had this light overnight next to my bedroom, and the next day I thought, I'm so jet-lagged. Wait, so is the algae!" 

A mechanism made the lamp rotate so the algae would glow; a separate glass orb let visitors shake it themselves. "You'd see an 80-year-old or a seven-year-old get so excited."

“The show was in Southseaport – a highly trafficked area – and I'd take people into this little dark room, and they couldn't even see, and they'd say, 'Hold my hand.'" Ostia views this  experience as a recreation of her own first encounter with the organisms, so visitors can feel "enchanted, enamored.”

“You have to make people feel something, but is it also important to remember that once the artwork is out, it's up to the person that sees it. It's their experience, not mine."

If there's a constant with her art, it's teaching. Lolo started as a teaching assistant at the International Center of Photography twelve years ago, and education is an important part of her practice. 

"My material research and educational workshops are really rooted in my interest in education and social activism," she says. "There's something so powerful about education, and not only within an institution. Universities are great, but public access to education, public workshops, that's where the change is."

Lolo has been teaching classes like Intro to Biomaterials and Fashion Forecasting at Genspace since 2023. One class stuck with her. In a recent Intro to Bioplastics class, some of the attendees had attended her grad school while others were high schoolers on scholarship, recently arrived asylum seekers who didn't yet speak much English. "The class became bilingual by accident, and it was great," she says. "Biomaterials, bilingual, touching things, we did two recipes, one bioplastic that looks more foamy, one more like a resin. It was enriching for everyone, because we were all navigating it together."

Lolo’s passion for education connects to something we feel strongly about at Genspace: that science has an accessibility problem. "Science has been suffering from bad PR," she says. "People are afraid of the concept. But everything, from cooking to walking, is science. If you make tea, that's scientific. The problem is that science gets put in this space that seems unattainable. People suffer from jargonitis, same in the art world. I'm not trying to be this overqualified person. I'm still learning every day."

The knowledge she's drawn to often predates institutions: "Bioplastic has existed since pre-Hispanic cultures. We got lost in industrialization and our love for petroleum, but now everyone is going green. Ancestral knowledge is not a trend. And being an immigrant is not a trend, either."

That last point is personal. "What makes an artist stand out is their own experience," she says. "I'm an immigrant. I've been in spaces where I was the only foreigner, the only one with an accent."  To her photography became its own language. "There are things that don't translate. Through art, the visual language can be so much richer."

Her current Genspace project pushes that language somewhere new: a green-fluorescent SCOBY with genetically engineered yeast. "I'm interested in bringing genetic engineering into an art context, not just bioart," she says. "People are focused on AI, on cyborgs, but it's all so robotic. And robots are not cute. I said it, and I don't regret it." When she first told people, the reaction was wary. "Everybody kept asking, 'Why are you working with genetically engineered material, you're an artist, that's dangerous.' But new things don't have to be bad. [They] can expand horizons. I use it as an educational tool."

Which brings us to the work she most wants you to see this summer.

Through fellowship with the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, a premier incubator that bridges human storytelling with advanced technology,  Lolo finally made a research trip she'd wanted to take for years: to the outskirts of a city called Pucallpa in the Peruvian Amazon. There, she connected with Casa Sanango, an organization running educational workshops for Indigenous children, and with the Shipibo Conibo community.

She was asked not to bring toys or plastic, to work with what was there, and to bring something they could learn from in exchange. So she brought silk, left over from teaching in China in 2024, and her goal was to dye it with natural pigments from the Amazon. "Silk is a symbol of luxury, but luxury doesn't have to mean financial. For me, what a luxury to be in the Amazon with this beautiful community." One day they lifted a length of fabric from a yellow dye bath and her teacher, Maribel, asked, 'Lolo, is this fabric gold?' I said, no, it's silk. She said, 'But the color.' I said that's the beautiful thing about silk, it can really show a real depth of color." 

Out of three weeks of dyeing came a film, made with a curator from the Peruvian platform Bloc Art: Mujer Planta (Woman Plant.) "It's this woman trying to connect with nature, and the nature is in the textiles. In Shipibo cosmology, plants are deities. She's wearing them, greeting each fabric along the way, which is also greeting the spirits that welcome her into the Amazon." It ends with a site-specific installation Ostia built in the jungle, entirely biodegradable, where the woman becomes part of the landscape. "She connects so well with nature that her spirit just stays there." 

Installing it had its hazards: "I had to be careful with the little gators. Local people that were present during the installation kept telling me to move my feet, so I was installing and kind of jumping the whole time."

Mujer Planta won first prize at the Pangue Video Art Festival and is showing at the New York Latin American Art Triennial on Governors Island, with a museum showing in Chile and an LA art fair appearance to follow in 2027. A larger project from the research is still to come. For Ostia, the route matters as much as the destinations: "As someone from South America, it's nice that the work goes back to South America, then comes back to North America. All the Americas combined."

And she's in no rush. "I feel very thankful that I can work as an artist, that my work has been in spaces that are accessible and institutionally recognized," she says. "But it's been a practice of many years, and I'm invested in it for the long term. I'm excited for what keeps coming, and I'm excited to keep learning."

For the past 5 years, she has been leading educational workshops at academic institutions such as Rhode Island School of Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Parsons School of Design, Stony Brook University and public spaces like Governors Island and Union Square. Most recently, she collaborated with Dior for a workshop focused on climate change initiatives and ecodesign.

You can see Lolo’s film on weekends on Governor’s Island at The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT) House #18 in Nolan Park through August 1, 2026.

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