Dr. Jamie Allen is an artist and researcher occupied with the ways that technologies and media affect psychic, social, material and natural ecologies, emphasizing and repairing the disparities of knowledge, access and inequality that these produce. He lives in Europe, and has studied chemical engineering, electrical engineering and music composition and media arts in Canada, Scotland and New York. He is an instigator and participant in formative scenes of techno-culture and media arts through involvement with groups like Eyebeam and its Sustainability Research Group, exhibitions like Electric Lab at Exit Art, and curating the RedHead arts space of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Alongside artistic and academic work, Dr. Allen has been an electronic engineer with IBM, a polymer chemist with DuPont Canada, an open-source developer and an exhibition designer with the American Museum of Natural History. Dr. Allen received his Ph.D. from the European Graduate School under the supervision of Siegfried Zielinski and Avital Ronell was awarded in 2015 (summa cum laude). He's held fellowships at a number of institutions, including the Traill College Visiting Fellow at Trent University in Canada and the Nam June Paik Art Centre in Korea.

Jamie Allen’s research and creative practices invoke text, events, workshops, media and material objects as well as other experimental, collaborative forms. Informed by a sense of the importance of engineering thought and infrastructural practices as concretizations of sustaining, exploitative and hopeful values and desire, he has been founder and initiator of a number of media labs, research institutes, community cultural spaces, and public-making ('publishing') projects. Allen is currently Senior Researcher at the Critical Media Lab Basel, having previously held the post of Canada Research Chair in Infrastructure, Media and Communications at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Head of Research with the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, and Assistant Director of the Culture Lab in the UK. He has been the recipient of systemic and large-scale research funding from the AHRC in the UK, the SSHRC in Canada, and the Swiss National Science Foundation, as well as numerous arts, cultural and residency grants and awards. His research engages with infrastructure studies, through methods known to art, media and design, also as these intersect the natural sciences (geosciences, ecology) and methods of the human sciences (ethnography, anthropology).

Jamie Allen teaches and gives workshops in cultural institutions and academic contexts all over the world. He has held teaching positions at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, Museum Studies at NYU, The Pratt Institute of Art & Design Department of Digital Arts, New Media Music at Hanyang University in Seoul, the Parsons School of Design and the Royal College of Art in London. His "workshop as artwork" practice has been developed in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the STEIM Studio for Electronic Instrumental Music and the Art Meets Radical Openness Festival, amongst many other.

Jamie Allen publishes and creates artworks and media, collaboratively and on his own, addressing topics such as the emergence of 'truth verification' technologies, the mediatisation and logistification of global environments and ecologies and the racialized history of the science of ecosystems, ecology. Selected artistic collaborative and group exhibitions consist of Emergent Strategies from the Deep, The Shape of a Practice at the House of World Cultures in Berlin, Invisible Threads: Technology and its Discontents, Olafur Eliasson's Festival of Future Nows at the Neue National Galerie, Berlin and documenta14 in Athens, Greece. Featured project exhibitions and performances include those with the Nikolaj Kunsthal, the Walk&Talk Festival in the Azores and transmediale.

Over many years of conceptualizing and working on long-term, collaborative research projects, Allen's current work continues to create technological and social encounters that address the disparities wrought by infrastructures, while further developing creative metabolic practices that attempt to heal the rifts created by these disparities. Along with continued interventions in infrastructure and media studies, works for exhibition and critical scholarship, current projects centre on participative and collaborative constellations that create 'metabolic infrastructures' of food, sustenance, and community; or a 'culinary cosmopolitics' that addresses migration, movement and infrastructures of metabolic privilege. Jamie is working on a book project entitled "A Philosophy of Infrastructure", which develops a media-based catalogue of the ways in which infrastructures frame and allow particular perceptual, social, ecological and creative realities to emerge.