Claire Isabel Webb

Associate Director, Programs

Claire Isabel Webb directs the Future Humans program at the Berggruen Institute, where she explores the radical scientific transformations shaping life, mind, and outer space. A historian and theorist, her work bridges the history of biology and space exploration, speculative science, and experimental art and storytelling. She writes and presents for popular science audiences, in academic journals and workshops, and in art publications and performances.

Webb earned her PhD from MIT in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS). Her book project, Reflexive Alienation, traces how scientists have developed experimental practices to anticipate alien life, even in the face of its enduring unknowability. As founder and director of Future Humans, she leads projects bridging science, philosophy, technology, and art, including Próxima Kosmos, Future Wunderkammer, and Vaster Than Empires. Since 2023, she has also been the convenor of a Berggruen Institute workshop on the philosophy and future of consciousness.

By Claire Isabel Webb

Proxima Kósmos at Getty PST Open House

Proxima Kósmos at Getty PST Open House

Planetary Summit

Planetary Summit Speakers

Future Histories of Life, Otherwise

Future Histories of Life, Otherwise

Fiction and Futures

Interview with Qiufan (Stanley) Chen

“It’s About the Present and Future, Simultaneously,” Interview with Qiufan (Stanley) Chen

Interview with Ken Liu

“The Ultimate Expressions of Very Long Linages,” Interview with Ken Liu

“What is Collective Intelligence?”

“Being Human is About Storytelling,” Interview with Claire Isabel Webb

“Being Human is About Storytelling,” Interview with Claire Isabel Webb

“Take the Broadest Temporal View,” Interview with Theo Downes-Le Guin

“Take the Broadest Temporal View,” Interview with Theo Downes-Le Guin

Chapter 4: Future Technê Summit - FORMING INTELLIGENCE, video thumbnail

Chapter 4: Future Technê Summit - FORMING INTELLIGENCE

Chapter 3: Narrating the Future, video thumbnail

Chapter 3: Narrating the Future

Chapter 2: Ipseity, video thumbnail

Chapter 2: Ipseity

Chapter 1: Air Age Blueprint, video thumbnail

Chapter 1: Air Age Blueprint

Assembly Theory and the Complexity of Life

Reflexive Alienation: Pondering Cosmic Otherness with Dario Robleto

Cosmic vision

Future Humans Theme Explores the Question: “What Will Life Become?”

Multispecies Constitution Project: Meeting 1

Berggruen Institute Hosts What Will Life Become? Conference on Technology and the Human

Berggruen Fellows Aim to Reinvent Governance, Imagine Radically Different Futures for Global Systems and Institutions

The Ladder, the Sphere and the Rhizome

Berggruen Institute