Cynthia Fan was born in Durban in 1991 and grew up on the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal. She is a fine artist, writer and plant biologist whose work encompasses research, curation, and sculpture in the medium of plant arrangement.
She has a PhD in Plant Molecular Biology from the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, where her research focused on begonias. She is a contributing writer to The Plant magazine, a former artist-in-residence at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York City, and is one half of Pear_ed collective, which spends time with plants between Cape Town, London and Amsterdam.
Her plant sculpture work has been exhibited internationally. She lives in London.
Portrait photo by Jesse Navarre Vos
