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Dr Libby Heaney is an award winning visual artist with a PhD & professional research background in Quantum Information Science. She is widely known as the first artist to work with quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium. 

Heaney’s practice explores inherently queer, non-local and hybrid concepts from quantum science to disrupt binary categories and hierarchies and foster radical interconnectedness. Her works combine diverse mediums such as performance, moving image, glass and watercolour with cutting-edge technologies including machine learning, game engines and quantum computing, entangling interior landscapes with the impact of the exterior realm.

Crucially Heaney’s works continuously seek to expand the possibilities of the individual and the collective through the magic of quantum, transcending capitalist uses of technology.

Through the ambivalent mechanisms and logic of quantum, Heaney creates new non-linear modes of affective storytelling, blurring fact and fiction and embracing both narrative and intuitive visceral embodied experiences. 

As a scientist Heaney worked at the University of Oxford and National University of Singapore, publishing 20 physics papers in top peer reviewed journals. She was the recipient of the HSBC and Institute of Physics, Very Early Career Woman in Physics award. In 2015 Heaney graduated from Central St. Martins, London with a focus on AI and kinetic sculpture. 

Since then, Heaney has exhibited at major institutions and museums in the UK and internationally such as Ars Electronica, Linz; Tate Modern, London; V&A Museum, London. Her significant solo exhibitions and performances include Quantum Soup, HEK, Basel; Heartbreak and Magic, Somerset House, London; The Evolution of Ent-: QX, arebyte Gallery, London; The Whole Earth Chanting, Sonar Festival, Barcelona; CASCADE, Southbank Centre, London and Ent-, LAS Art Foundation, Berlin. From 2017 to 2024 she was a resident of Somerset House Studios in London and in 2022, Heaney won the Lumen Prize and Falling Walls Art & Science award.

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