Libby Heaney is an award-winning artist with a PhD in quantum information science and is recognised as the first artist to use quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium, beginning in 2019. Her practice weaves together advanced technologies, including quantum computing, AI and game engines, with traditional media such as watercolour, glass and performance. Her work uses quantum materiality and quantum concepts as lenses through which to challenge Western assumptions about the “individual” and nature of “self”. She entangles inner spaces: emotion, memory & psychology, with nature and the impacts of technology, proposing alternative, posthuman ways of feeling, seeing and being.

Through a dreamlike aesthetic, Heaney’s work asks what happens when images and copying are impossible and how we make meaning through embodiment and feeling instead. Through this approach, Heaney has developed a distinctive visual and conceptual language for what she calls quantum feeling. Care, belonging, magic and politics enter the work through continuously unfolding uncertainties and how meanings remain unresolved.

Her work is often deeply personal shaped by intimate encounters with grief, memory, ecological loss and family, while asking philosophical questions about the nature of existence and consciousness. Audiences typically encounter monsters, hybrids, layered multiverses and fluid landscapes, often evoking visceral emotional responses.

Heaney trained as a scientist before turning to art. She holds a PhD in quantum information science from the University of Leeds, with postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. This scientific training is central to her artistic method, grounding her work in sustained engagement with quantum theory. Between 2015 and 2019 she held a permanent academic post at the Royal College of Art in London, where she helped shape contemporary dialogues between art, science and emerging technologies, which she continues to do through her art practice and talks.

Heaney’s work has been presented internationally at institutions including solo exhibitions or performances at Museum of the Moving Image, New York; HEK, Basel; LAS Art Foundation, Berlin; Somerset House, London; ArtScience Museum, Singapore; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; Orleans House Gallery, London among others.

She has exhibited in group shows at institutions such as Frist Museum, Nashville; Sainsbury Centre, Norwich; V&A Museum, London; ArtScience Museum, Singapore; CCCB, Barcelona and Belvedere 21, Vienna, among others.

She has received numerous awards including the Lumen Prize and the Falling Walls Art & Science Prize both 2022, Arts Council England Project Grants and is currently developing new commissions with the and the British Council in partnership with Museum MACAN, Jakarta.

Her work is in public and private collections including the UK’s Government Art Collection, 0X Collection, Zabludowicz Collection and multiple private anonymous collections.