Photo by Alexa Viscius
Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring biology, technology, and culture.
She is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, co-founder of VICE’s imprint for speculative fiction, Terraform, and co-editor, with Brian Merchant, of the accompanying anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn (MCD Books, 2022). Her 2018 history of women in computing, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, published by Penguin Random House, has been translated into six languages and was named one of the Top 10 Best Nonfiction Tech Books of All Time in 2023.
Her writing has appeared in MIT Technology Review, WIRED, The Verge, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Document Journal, Eye on Design, The Believer, and Aeon, among others. Her 2022 profile of the lost hacker Susy Thunder was nominated for an ASME Award; a feature film adaptation of the story is currently in development at Paramount Pictures.
She has given invited talks at the Hirshhorn Museum, Walker Art Center, TEDx, La Gaité Lyrique, Google I/O, The New Museum, XOXO Festival, MUTEK, Goethe Institut, Manchester International Festival, SXSW, Gray Area, Neural Information Processing Systems, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Decentralized Web Summit, among others. She is a 2024 MacDowell Calderwood Fellow for Journalism.
She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an advisor to students in the Media Design Practices program at Art Center College of Design.
She is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, co-founder of VICE’s imprint for speculative fiction, Terraform, and co-editor, with Brian Merchant, of the accompanying anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn (MCD Books, 2022). Her 2018 history of women in computing, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, published by Penguin Random House, has been translated into six languages and was named one of the Top 10 Best Nonfiction Tech Books of All Time in 2023.
Her writing has appeared in MIT Technology Review, WIRED, The Verge, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Document Journal, Eye on Design, The Believer, and Aeon, among others. Her 2022 profile of the lost hacker Susy Thunder was nominated for an ASME Award; a feature film adaptation of the story is currently in development at Paramount Pictures.
She has given invited talks at the Hirshhorn Museum, Walker Art Center, TEDx, La Gaité Lyrique, Google I/O, The New Museum, XOXO Festival, MUTEK, Goethe Institut, Manchester International Festival, SXSW, Gray Area, Neural Information Processing Systems, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Decentralized Web Summit, among others. She is a 2024 MacDowell Calderwood Fellow for Journalism.
She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an advisor to students in the Media Design Practices program at Art Center College of Design.
“Evans tells the story like a friend who knows you get bored easily; a generous sort of brilliance.” — Miranda July
“Evans is the whole package.” — Cory Doctorow
“An insightful, intelligent observer.” — The New York Times
SELECTED PROJECTS
Terraform is a literary incubator for speculative fiction co-founded in 2014 with Brian Merchant; home to hundreds of award-winning short stories, Twitter bots, interactive fiction projects, and graphic narratives from emerging and established authors. The print anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn was published by MCDxFSG Originals in August 2022.
The Computer Accent is a feature documentary following YACHT during the research, composition, and recording of the GRAMMY-nominated album Chain Tripping. Produced and directed by MEMORY. World premiered at CPH:DOX, available to rent or buy on AppleTV and Prime Video.
Wild Information is an ongoing newsletter sharing news and new writing, tracking the evolution of ideas as they form into a book, with an emphasis on ecology, computing, biology, and consciousness. The Wild Information Are.na channel, which serves as a feed for research that inspires the newsletter, is available here.
SVS is a play for four bots in three acts, created in collaboration with Tracy Chou for Rhizome.org Seven on Seven. Each iteration of the script, entirely voiced by bots, randomizes the names, genders, and nationalities of its characters; the play serves as bias test. SVS was performed live at the New Museum in New York City in 2016 and the Riverside Museum of Art, Beijing, in 2018; the script can be run—and viewed—here.