Dana-Fiona Armour

Dana-Fiona Armour, born in 1988 in Willich, Germany, is an artist who graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2019. Armour is currently resident at Collectif Poush, Aubervilliers. Her work is distinguished by its fusion of medicine, science and art, and she has had the opportunity to collaborate with researchers and doctors on several of her projects. Invited as the first artist-in-residence at Cellectis (a genome engineering company specializing in the development of immunotherapies), she developed the MC1R project. Exhibited at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, France (2022), this project is a blend of visual art and biotechnology.

In residence at Villa Medici, Dana-Fiona Armour will be developing a research and prospecting project on the snake in the medical field, from Antiquity to the present day. Her aim is to explore this subject and draw inspiration from it for her body of work. She will focus on the venomous apparatus of the snake, in particular the venomous fang, as well as the chemical composition of venom, its enzymes and molecules. She will also pay particular attention to theriac, a medicine prepared from opium and viper flesh, the recipe for which was developed by Andromache, physician to the Roman emperor Nero. Rome, as the cradle of medicine, will be an essential place for the realization of his research and the inspiration for his future work.