Catherine Anabella Lie is an Indonesian interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, educator, and baker. Growing up among brutalist buildings overtaken by moss, monsoon-flooded streets, and community improvisations amid aggressive development, she grounds her practice in commoning – guided by decolonial ecologies, diasporic storytelling, and relational technologies. Her work traces the entanglements between the built environment and ecology, drawing on indigenous epistemologies and transmedia storytelling to imagine collective worldbuilding through everyday acts of care, translation, and making.

Moving between scores, videos, texts, and their material translations, Catherine unearths alternative histories through accessible materials, DIY treatments, and poetic forms of language. Her practice weaves themes of interdependence, cyclical time, and mutual care across contexts of hospitality, pedagogy, and spatial design. Her participatory works unfold through collaboration with human, non-human, and more-than-human kin: stuffed animals that reimagine kinship and identity; a broken phone that broadcasts global copper mining operations; and sourdough starter as a pedagogical lens for design and ecology.

She holds a Master of Architecture from MIT, where she was awarded the Fialkow Fellowship for her thesis sourdough architecture (2020). Her work has been presented at Galerija Kolektiv, Wiesner Gallery, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Sakiya, Museum MACAN, A.I.R. Gallery, Salón ACME, and KLA Art Festival, among others.

Beyond exhibiting internationally, Catherine contributes to site-responsive, socio-ecological projects across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the MENA region. Most recently, she has been expanding sourdough architecture as linguistic, pedagogical, and architectural experiments at La Casa Encendida, Paisanaje, CACiS (Spain), and Pocoapoco (Mexico). She was a fellow at RAW Académie Session 11: A Sense of Place / Displacement, Replacement, Non-placement (Dakar) and a participant in School of Common Knowledge 2025: UP/ROOTING (Madrid/Barcelona).