TED Senior Fellow Jae Rhim Lee develops new rituals and objects around death to point us toward a more sustainable future, including a mushroom burial suit that converts our unused bodies efficiently into clean compost.

Why you should listen

Jae Rhim Lee is a visual artist and mushroom lover. In her early work as a grad student at MIT, she built systems that reworked basic human processes before turning to work on a compelling new plan for the final human process: decomposition. Her Infinity Burial Project explores the choices we face after death and how our choices reflect our denial or acceptance of death's physical implications. She's been developing a new strain of fungus, the Infinity Mushroom, that feeds on and remediates the industrial toxins we store in our bodies and convert our bodies into nutrients.

What others say

“Jae Rhim Lee's work challenges the boundaries prescribed by society and culture between self and other by proposing unorthodox relationships for the mind/body/self.” — MIT

Jae Rhim Lee’s TED talk

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