Fellows
Born in Latvia, raised in the UK, and now a proud Angeleno, Viktoria Modesta is a bionic artist, creative director, and researcher, widely known as the world’s first “Bionic Pop Artist.” After an elective leg amputation in 2007 following childhood medical complications, she turned her physicality into a platform for “artful survival,” a philosophy that frames creativity and technology as powerful tools for reimagining human value, form, and our relationship to augmentation. Modesta has consistently pushed the boundaries of modern identity, defining a new frontier of technological embodiment through her 2012 Summer Paralympics performance and the viral Channel 4 film Prototype, winner of a Silver Lion at Cannes, which reframed prosthetics as iconography and innovation. Moving fluidly across art, medicine, space, and innovation, she has collaborated with NASA JPL, Rolls-Royce, and the MIT Media Lab, where she served as a Director’s Fellow. A UNDP 2060 Ambassador and Mission AstroAccess pioneer, she is the subject of an Emmy-nominated documentary.
During the Evermay Future Fellows residency, Viktoria will formalize a vision of cultural infrastructure for our rapidly evolving technological destiny, derived from her ongoing AI-driven project, Metabodies. She plans to write a rigorous thesis or white paper to serve as the intellectual foundation for navigating the present and future conditions of amplified human capacity, helping translate augmentation from specialized research into the mainstream. Alongside presenting at the Disability Innovation Forum and launching the Metabodies Diaries podcast, she will use Evermay’s interdisciplinary environment to begin designing the architecture for a large-scale global cultural event targeted for the LA 2028 Games. Inspired by the original Olympic movement, this project aims to bring culture back to the center of human achievement, uniting medical innovation, space research, disability culture, and the arts to keep our vision of human identity grounded in present knowledge, our technologies human-centered, and the future of human and machine shaped by diverse and conscious global collaboration.
