Brandon Ballengée’s Love Motel for Insects TEDx talk

Brandon Ballengée has two big passions – art and bugs. So how does the visual artist and biologist combine these loves? By building art installations equipped with lights to attract bugs, of course! These “Love Motels” for insects scattered across the globe also help raise awareness of the human impact on the environment and his beloved bugs.

Brandon Ballengée is a visual artist, biologist and environmental educator creates multi-media artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research. Ballengée’s art has been exhibited internationally in over 20 countries and in the summer of 2013 the first career survey of his work debuted at the Château de Charamarande (Essonne, France), which travelled to the Museum Het Domein (Sittard, Netherlands) in 2014. In the fall of 2016, the first US mid-career retrospective of his work opened at the University of Wyoming Art Museum (Laramie, Wyoming). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2017) and Awards from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (2015, 2016). He holds a Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Art and Biology from the University of Plymouth (England). Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) studying the impact of the 2010 oil spill on Gulf of Mexico fish species.