BEAM is a new kind of climate institution — part creative studio, part research lab, part public imagination engine. Founded by Annie Chen and Zoe Lee, BEAM approaches the climate crisis as both a planetary emergency and a cultural inflection point—one that demands new connective tissue between science, technology, ecology, and society. Their work investigates how emerging technologies meet lived context, how communities build power and agency, and how shared imaginaries shape the futures people are willing to work toward.
BEAM partners with science-led and climate-action organizations to translate complex work into clarity — building tools, public narratives, and impact campaigns that turn research into something people can understand, trust, and act on. Drawing from expertise in biology, behavioral decision sciences, and design, BEAM brings interdisciplinary fluency and sociotechnical expertise to collaborations spanning ocean restoration, biotechnology, community resilience, and climate governance.
BEAM’s work has been supported by NEW INC, The New York Foundation for the Arts, the Interlace Fund, UNESCO Ocean Decade, MIT Open Documentary Lab, and a wide ecosystem of blue-sector collaborators.
EXPERIENCE + WORK @ FISH FACTORY
We spent our residency at Fish Factory working on TIDELANDS, a game and film about coastal futures on the U.S. East Coast. We brought part of our team—Annie, Zoe, Ellen, and Ryan—to Stöðvarfjörður to focus on the project and push it to the next phase of development.
Most days were spent worldbuilding: research on the aquaculture systems and low-fi solarpunk technologies of the New Alchemists of the ‘70s, making a big map of the Rhode Island coastline, painting, filming, recording sound, prototyping in Unreal, cooking a lot, and wandering around the surrounding landscape. Being in a place so intimately tied to fish (literally!) and water shaped how we thought about community, place, and change.
We met people from town, filmed local band Sarasótt, and got to be there for the inauguration of Fish Factory as a cultural center in the Eastfjords. Mostly, it was just a generous, grounding place to think, make, and be together. We miss Fish Factory already, and hope to return soon <3