Founded by Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas (artists and educators, born in Lithuania) Urbonas Studio is an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. In collaboration with experts from different cultural and professional fields Urbonas Studio develops practice-based research models merging a variety of materials and techniques from new media, urbanism, social science, pedagogy and ecology. Often beginning with archival research, Urbonas Studio deploys a methodology of organizational aesthetics to create complex participatory works that investigate urban environment, cultural and technological sphere and challenges of new climatic regimes.
Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas have exhibited internationally including the Venice, San Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, Gwangju Biennales and Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions among numerous other international shows, including solo shows and curatorial projects at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, Venice Biennale and MACBA Barcelona among others. Their work was awarded a number of grants and awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize (2007), a Prize for the Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006), the Honorable mention for the best national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007), and nomination for the Nam June Paik Award in 2012.
Urbonas’ writings on the artistic research as a form of intervention to social and political crisis were published in the books Devices for Action (2008) by MACBA Press, Barcelona and Villa Lituania (2008) by Sternberg Press . Urbonas co-edited Public Space? Lost and Found (MIT Press, 2017) that brings together artists, planners, theorists and art historians in an examination of the complex inter-relations between the creation and uses of public space and the roles that public art plays therein.
In 2018 Urbonas curated the Swamp School – Lithuanian participation at 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. The book Swamps and the New Imagination. On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture and Philosophy (edited by Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas and Kristupas Sabolius) published by Sternberg Press and distributed by MIT Press, is forthcoming in 2024.
Urbonas Studio is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Vilnius, Lithuania. Gediminas Urbonas is a professor at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture and Planning; Nomeda is MIT research affiliate.