Maria Manuela Lopes is a visual artist and researcher based in Portugal and the UK. Her current practice is transdisciplinar and based on issues of memory and self-identity informed by life sciences and medical research and presented in the form of time-based installations, occasionally including biological materials. She has been working and showing nationally and internationally and also teaching fine arts in Portugal since 1998. She has studied fine arts - sculpture at the FBAUP-Porto, Portugal and did an MA at Goldsmiths College in London. She has a Doctorate from Brighton University + UCA Farnham, UK (supervised by de Kathleen Rogers, João Lobo Antunes e Judith Williamson), working with representational strategies of Alzheimer?s disease in a neuroscience laboratory at Hospital Santa Maria and Molecular Medicine Institute in Lisbon. She is currently involved in a Post Doc project in University of Aveiro ID+ and University of Oporto IBMC (Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology) ? supervised by Kathleen Rogers, Alexandre Quintanilha e Rosa Oliveira-, that extends the PhD project into a wider cultural scenario questioning what it means to be human in a techno-enhanced society. Maria is also assistant-Director of two residency programs: 1) ?artists in Labs? Ectopia - Lisbon, and 2) Cultivamos Cultura, an ecological oriented residency program in a farm in Alentejo. She has concurrently been presenting her work internationally at conferences and also publishing.