Dr Alejandro Luna is a transdisciplinary researcher and artist whose work asks how art-led research can inform environmental policy. Trained as a biologist and plant taxonomist, he studies how we classify and come to know the living world, and argues that these classificatory decisions are not neutral descriptions but are already at work inside environmental policy, determining what it is able to see, value, and protect. His research treats artistic practice as a rigorous mode of knowledge production: one that can surface the embodied, more-than-human, and contested dimensions of ecological problems that conventional policy analysis tends to leave out.

As Honorary Lecturer at Imperial College London's Centre for Environmental Policy, he lectures on sustainability transitions, innovation for sustainability, and the circular economy, drawing on the fashion and textile industries as cases through which to examine how sectors shift toward more sustainable systems. His research brings a taxonomist's lens to environmental governance, arguing that the categories through which policy sorts the world (resource and waste, stakeholder and externality, nature and culture) are not neutral facts but classificatory decisions that determine what governance can see and act on. He asks what land is for, how decision-making might account for more-than-human agency, and how differently the world would be governed if it were classified from another standpoint, including that of other beings. Working from the premise that culture and nature are inseparable, his interest is in enabling nature to recover, and in frameworks of value that reach beyond narrowly economic agendas.

This enquiry draws on two bodies of work. As Director of the MSc in Science and Technology Policy at the University of Sussex (SPRU), and through research on serendipity in research and innovation, he examined how knowledge systems produce, fund, and mobilise what they know. In parallel, through Maison Trampoline and his teaching on the MA Biodesign at Central Saint Martins (UAL), he develops art- and design-led research with living materials and ecological narratives. His argument is that these are not separate careers but a single enquiry: how the framing of the living world governs our capacity to act on it.

His work spans academic research and practice, with publications in journals including Nature Communications, Systematic Botany, and Science and Public Policy. Across science, policy, and art, he works to widen the range of knowledge that environmental decision-making can draw on, treating how we know the living world as inseparable from how we govern, design, and repair it.