Patricia Piccinini (born 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone) is an Australian artist who works in a variety of media, including painting, video, sound, installation, digital prints, and sculpture. Her works focus on "unexpected consequences", conveying concerns surrounding bio-ethics and help visualize future dystopias. In 2003, Piccinini represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale with a hyperrealist sculpture of her distinctive anthropomorphic animals. In 2016 The Art Newspaper named Piccinini with her "grotesque-cum-cute, hyper-real genetics fantasies in silicone" the most popular contemporary artist in the world after a show in Rio de Janeiro attracted over 444,000 visitors. Natasha Bieniek's portrait of Piccinini was a finalist for the 2022 Archibald Prize. Early life Piccinini was born in Sierra Leone in 1965 to Teodoro and Agnes Piccinini. She moved to Canberra, Australia when she was 7 years old. She attended Red Hill Primary, Telopea Park High School and Narrabundah College (a secondary college). Academia After high school, Piccinini began studying economics at Australian National University. Later she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1991. In 2016 she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Visual and Performing Arts by the University of Melbourne's Victorian College of the Arts and appointed their Enterprise Professor. In 2014 she received the Artist Award from the Melbourne Art Foundation's Awards for the Visual Arts. Works 1995 to 1997 Before finding the medium of sculpture, Piccinini experimented with world-building through photography and digital enhancements. ‘The Mutant Genome Project’ (1995), features commercially available designer babies called LUMP (Lifeform with Unevolved Human Properties). Her ‘Protein Lattice’ (1997) series features nude models posing with computer-generated mutant rats. The two series explored the commercial side of science and brought up the question of ethics. The Protein Lattice series was inspired by the famous Vacanti mouse experiment in 1996. The experiment formed a human ear on a rat. The research’s objective was to learn more about cells, and how humans can possibly regrow body part. 2000 to 2011 According to her 2002 National Gallery of Victoria biography: Piccinini has an ambivalent attitude towards technology and she uses her artistic practice as a forum for discussion about how technology impacts upon life. She is keenly interested in how contemporary ideas of nature, the natural and the artificial are changing our society. Specific works have addressed concerns about biotechnology, such as gene therapy and ongoing research