Nancy Burson

Nancy Burson is best known as the inventor of facial morphing, a result of her early collaboration with the MIT Media lab in the late 1970s, from which she created the first realistic composite digital portraits. These same technologies would later be adapted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, laying the groundwork for current facial recognition and AI developments.

A selection of Burson’s early composite portraits will be on display in 'Light Matter'. As she says, “We are all composites in that we are composites of our parents, our decades, and our ancestry. We are also composites of our ancient DNA, now recognized as relevant to what we’ve inherited over the past 5000 years of our lineages. Additionally, we are also composites of every atom within us that were once a part of stars.”