Caitlin Berrigan works as a visual artist, writer, and researcher. Her early works address viruses and the spatial choreographies of capitalism and contagion. Recent works explore poetics and queer science fiction as world-making practices through instruments and moving image. She has been developing a speculative cosmology, Imaginary Explosions, that blends research science with art and fiction. The episodic series centers geological animacies as transfeminist scientists cooperate with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. The work has been the subject of a book (Broken Dimanche Press, 2018) a solo show at Art in General reviewed in Artforum (2019), a world premiere in the Berlinale Forum Expanded Exhibition (2020), and a solo exhibition at JOAN Los Angeles (February–April 2023). She has presented her work at the Whitney Museum, Poetry Project, Henry Art Gallery, Harvard Carpenter Center, Anthology Film Archives, La Casa Encendida, Ashkal Alwan, Goldsmith's and other international venues. Her experimental essays are published by e-flux, Georgia, MARCH, and Duke University Press. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Humboldt Foundation, Skowhegan, Graham Foundation, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. Currently a PhD-in-Practice researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Berrigan has held full-time and visiting faculty positions at NYU Tisch, Bard College Berlin, Harvard, and UMass Boston.

As Artist in Residence at Caltech for the Winter term 2022-23, she will conduct research on deep sea imaginaries, hydrothermal vents, rare earth mining, and computational photography. As a Guest Lecturer, she will teach a class on worldbuilding as a method in her own practice, and as a tool of fiction, art-making, statecraft, and activism.