Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Zeina Barakeh @ UC Berkeley
The Department of Art Practice is excited to welcome Zeina Barakeh for our Fall ’26 Visiting Artist Lecture Series. This lecture will take place from 5-6:30pm in Room 285, Anthropology and Art Practice Building (AAPB). All artist talks are free and open to the public.
“CYBOTAGE: Brain-Computer Interfaces and the Politics of Public Art”
In this talk, Zeina Barakeh will map the trajectory of her work from gallery and museum contexts into public art, using research to lodge her practice within—and against—the infrastructures and ethics of global security. Her project CYBOTAGE—an ongoing investigation into brain–computer interfaces and military human enhancement—extends across public works, workshops with veterans, webinars, and research as artistic intervention.
Zeina Barakeh (b. Beirut) is a Palestinian Lebanese artist whose work is shaped by lived experience in wartime Lebanon. She examines the militarization of the body, surveillance, human enhancement, and the shifting boundaries between humans and machines across kinetic and cyberwarfare.
Her public art works include Standard of Capital for the Salesforce Tower Top (San Francisco); PsyClone Calafia, commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission; Remix on the ZAZ Corner Jumbotron (Times Square); and CYBOGUARDIANS on the MIX Center façade (Mesa, Arizona). Exhibitions span MuCEM (Marseille); Yinchuan MOCA (China); the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco); Peabody Essex Museum (Salem); Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco); Bernstein Gallery at Princeton University; and the Middle East Institute (Washington, DC), among others. Her film festivals include the 11th Harlem International Film Festival (New York), the 19th Kerry Film Festival (Ireland), the Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin, and the Los Angeles Art-House Film Festival, where her work has received awards for experimental animation. She has held residencies at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions and the Vermont Studio Center. Barakeh is the recipient of the 2024 SF Bay Area Artadia Award and the 2025 Leonardo-ASU Seed Grant for CYBOTAGE.