Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Video, Performance, Installation, Digital Art, Net Art, Conceptual Art, Research, Books and Prints
Website: liatberdugo.com
Liat Berdugo is an artist and writer based in Oakland, California, whose work investigates embodiment, labor, and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. She is an associate professor of Design in the Department of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco, where she also directs the UX/UI minor. Her interdisciplinary practice weaves together video, performance, writing, and computer programming to examine how bodies and technology intersect under contemporary economic conditions.
Berdugo is the co-founder and co-curator of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art salon that gathers artists and audiences in living rooms across Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area. She is also one half of the collaborative art duo Anxious to Make (with artist Emily Martinez), whose work addresses the so-called “sharing economy” and the precarity facing artists under neoliberal capitalism. Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life, and Places Journal, and her monograph The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East (Bloomsbury/I.B.Tauris, 2021) examines how cameras mediate contested visual rights in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Berdugo has held residencies at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley (2025-26), the Internet Archive in San Francisco (2020), the Santa Fe Art Institute (2018-19), and the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder (2019). She received an MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design (2013) and a BA in Mathematics and Philosophy from Brown University (2008).
Berdugo’s practice is resolutely interdisciplinary, combining performance, video, digital intervention, and institutional critique to examine the entanglement of bodies, labor, and technological infrastructure. Her work often takes a deadpan, instructional form — most notably in Internet Aerobics (2018-20), a twenty-minute aerobics workout routine in which choreographed moves physically embody the internet’s infrastructure, from data packets speeding through fiber-optic cables to the throttling effects of eroded net neutrality protections. This pedagogical approach — using the body to “explain” digital systems — recurs throughout her practice, treating technology not as neutral or emancipatory but as deeply embedded in histories of conflict, surveillance, and capital.
A recurring concern is the entanglement of visibility, labor, and platform economies. Through Anxious to Make, Berdugo and Martinez examine the anxiety to make that pervades contemporary artistic life under accelerationist economic pressures. More recently, her practice has expanded into textile and photographic media, using AI tools and fabric printing to document and reframe archival materials related to Israel and Palestine — work developed during her residency at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and featured in the 2026 exhibition Flow State at the David Brower Center.
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