Donna Bilak

Donna Bilak is a historian of early modern science and a goldsmith. She founded and directs the Common Ground collective, an experimental sandbox for cross-professional collaborations that develop solution-oriented artisanal projects to address environmental issues. Donna currently leads the Common Ground project Hot Gems Urban Alchemy, which adapts historical glassmaking technologies to transform invasive plant biomass into commercializable bio-jewels with the potential to underwrite a scalable, long-term ecological stewardship system based on building a distributed, locally rooted, globally networked business that heals landscapes through adornment.

Past projects include Gold & Mercury (2020–23), which examined physical and cultural transformations caused by these two interrelated metals from a global, transhistorical perspective; and Furnace & Fugue (2013–20), which reconstructed the 17th-century metaphysical view of gold and mercury’s relationship in which material transformation presents the pathway to practical wisdom.