Barb Macek is a writer, poet and artistic researcher. Since 2016, she has been involved in transdisciplinary research projects exploring the intersection of pain, poetry and autoimmunity. She has received several awards, most recently from the Society for Artistic Research. In 2019, she published Lykanthropus erythematosus, a monograph on the autoimmune disease SLE. After completing her research fellowship at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, she was awarded her PhD from the University of Applied Arts Vienna in February 2024. Her current artistic research project focuses on developing a poetics of autoimmunity.