MISTI Lithuania: Artistic Intelligence, Energy Humanities, and a Transatlantic Vision

The origins of MISTI Lithuania trace back to the summer of 2022, just months after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was then that Urbonas met with Professor Elizabeth Wood and MIT-Eurasia Managing Director Ekaterina Zabrovski to explore how MIT could foster transatlantic academic bridges with countries facing heightened geopolitical threats, particularly in the Baltic region. What began as a pilot exchange grew into a national consortium involving major universities and companies including Lithuanian Railways, Ignitis Group, and Novian Group. This effort was made possible through the generous support of MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS) and the collegial engagement of Areg Danagoulian, faculty co-director of the MIT-Eurasia program. At the heart of this vision is scale. “What Lithuania can offer is a unique laboratory of manageable scale… to experiment with autonomous energy grids, climate resilience, cyber security, biotech and regional collaboration across the Baltic Sea,” Urbonas explained.

Working closely with Gintaras Valinčius, the chairman of the Lithuanian Research Council, as well as with the Global Lithuanian Leaders network (GLL), the team assembled a powerful coalition of universities, public institutions, private companies and startups. Among others this included the National Gallery of Art, which hosted MIT student interns in Lithuania during the summers of 2023 and 2024.

Encouraged by the success of these pilot internships and responding to growing interest from over 40 Lithuanian organizations, Urbonas and collaborators organized a strategic series of meetings in spring 2024, bringing together business leaders, university rectors and vice-rectors, and key officials from the Ministries of the Economy and Innovation, Education, Science and Sport, and Energy. Together, they identified shared priorities in fields such as energy transition, biotechnology, cybersecurity, quantum technologies, and transportation futures.

With the guidance of Professors Elizabeth Wood and Bruce Tidor, former MIT Vice Provost for International Activities, and the dedicated coordination of Ina Žurkuvienė in Lithuania, this collaborative effort culminated in the founding of the MIT–Lithuania Consortium in fall 2024. In January 2025 an official collaboration agreement between the MIT Center for International Studies and the Consortium was signed at the Presidential Palace in Vilnius, Lithuania. The ceremony featured greetings from the President of Lithuania and the U.S. Ambassador, and included addresses by Elizabeth Wood, Urbonas himself, and Duane Boning, the new MIT Vice Provost for International Activities.

As part of the event, Professor Vladimir Bulović, Director of MIT.nano, delivered a keynote titled “The Future Will Be Measured in Nanometers,” setting the tone for a forward-looking, cross-disciplinary partnership. A panel discussion followed, bringing together leaders from academia and industry to explore new models for collaboration. “It’s important for us to have art in this equation,” said Urbonas. “We’re working to position art as a catalyst—an active agent of exchange across knowledge spheres. This is not just about STEM, but about STEAM—where we add ‘A’ for Art, Architecture, and Design to the core of scientific and technological innovation.”

The Research Council of Lithuania played a pivotal role in convening stakeholders and shaping the agenda. Today, Consortium members include a diverse array of Lithuanian universities, research institutes, and companies such as AB Ignitis Group, AB Lithuanian Railways, Novian, and Euromonitor International. All major Lithuanian stakeholders formally signed a commitment letter, solidifying the collaboration’s strategic and long-term direction.

Culture plays a vital role in shaping how we experience our environments and express identities within urban spaces. Hosting the North American Lithuanian Business Forum at MIT Media Lab in June 2025, Urbonas drew attention to a panel on cultural industries, emphasizing both their economic impact and emotional significance. “We looked at how cultural industries contribute to national economies—comparing figures from the U.S. and Lithuania,” he noted. “It’s not just about market value, but also about how culture anchors meaning, memory, and innovation in public life.”

Urbonas also pointed to socially impactful cultural programs, such as Massachusetts’ innovative “Cultural Pass”—a doctor-prescribed intervention aimed at alleviating loneliness and mental health challenges through cultural participation. “It’s like a doctor’s prescription to attend cultural events,” he explained. “Massachusetts is quite pioneering in experimenting with this approach.”

Later, Urbonas hosted a panel on energy innovation, where he reflected on the importance of diverse disciplinary voices in shaping technological futures. “You might ask, ‘Are you a nuclear physicist?’” he joked. “But I was speaking from a perspective that brings diversity to the energy field—specifically, through energy humanities. The idea that the humanities have a role to play, especially in guiding energy transition, is essential.”

He advocates for an approach that embraces design, ethics, and public imagination along with scientific expertise. “Why not embrace techno-diversity and energy diversity the way we do biodiversity?” he asked. “We need to include other perspectives—artistic, citizen science, and even more-than-human.”

Referencing data from MIT.nano’s Vladimir Bulović, Urbonas underscored a staggering planetary blind spot: “We are currently harnessing only 5.5% of the sun’s energy potential. That means we have the capacity to grow our use of solar energy by a factor of 80,000.”

But the challenge, Urbonas insists, is not merely technological — it’s fundamentally architectural and cultural. “The question isn’t whether solar energy is viable,” he says. “It’s how we reorient our buildings, infrastructures, and the very imagination of our cities toward the sun.”

In this light, the solar is no longer just a power source — it becomes an organizing principle. A spatial, ethical, and aesthetic shift.

Urbonas’s commitment to bridging art, science, and technological innovation is far from theoretical. In 2017, together with Nomeda Urbonas, he developed the Folke Stone Power Plant, an interdisciplinary project that transformed carbonized mushrooms into a graphene substitute for lithium-ion batteries.

“Collaborating with materials scientists at Kent University in the UK, we engineered and tested a functional battery,” he recalled. “It worked. We proved it.” The prototype stored electricity generated by mud-dwelling bacteria and successfully powered a defunct public streetlight—completely off the city grid. The project culminated in a Future Energy Summit, merging material experimentation with public discourse, and opening space for radically imaginative approaches to sustainable energy futures.

Over two pilot summers, MISTI Lithuania placed MIT students in cultural and technological institutions across Lithuania. “For example, Cheng-Hsin Chan designed furniture for a children’s educational playground at the National Gallery,” Urbonas said. “It has real potential to be realized.”

This summer, ACT graduate student Coco Allred (SMACT ’26) is exploring experimental pedagogies while building a dynamic network of collaborations across the Kaunas Biennale, Nida Art Colony, and with the curatorial team behind Lithuania’s 2023 Venice Biennale pavilion.

In March 2025, a delegation from the MIT–Lithuania Consortium visited MIT to strengthen research collaboration and build strategic networks. The group engaged with MIT leadership including President Sally Kornbluth, Duane Boning, Bruce Tidor, and other faculty and program leaders.

In June 2025, a larger Lithuanian delegation returned to MIT, taking part in a series of research visits and representing the Consortium at the North American Lithuanian Business Forum (NALB). At this forum Urbonas had the honor of moderating a high-level panel titled “Energy Innovation Through Collaboration,” which tackled the urgent challenges posed by rising global electricity demand. The session focused on the need for smarter, cleaner, and more secure energy systems. Panelists included Professor Vladimir Bulović (MIT), Professor Violeta Motuzienė (VILNIUS TECH), Professor Darius Milčius (Vytautas Magnus University), and Vytautas Bitinas (CTO of Lithuanian Railways). Together, they explored how international partnerships can accelerate progress in renewable energy, storage technologies, and grid modernization.

Looking ahead, plans are underway for a landmark MIT–Lithuania conference on October 9-10 2025 titled Human and More-than-human Futures: Innovating Technologies for Coexistence, to be held in Vilnius and Kaunas. This two-day event will convene over a dozen MIT principal investigators alongside a diverse group of Lithuanian academic, governmental, and industry partners. The program will feature keynote addresses and thematic sessions on quantum technologies, AI and governance, resilient cities, energy transitions, biotechnology, education, and synthetic biology.

The conference will include interdisciplinary panels and hands-on group workshops aimed at developing new models of international collaboration across science, technology, and design. These sessions are specifically designed to foster collaborative problem-solving with a key goal of translating discussions into tangible policy insights and actionable strategies. The closing session will also synthesize key insights into a document  with policy and research recommendations for the 2027–2032 phase of the MIT–Lithuania collaboration. It promises to be a moment of critical reflection and forward momentum—one that centers innovation through the lens of interspecies coexistence, planetary urgency, and cultural interconnection.

Urbonas also hinted at additional future initiatives such as hackathons, seed grants, and cross-disciplinary classrooms.

“We’re working with many parts of MIT,” Urbonas noted. “Our aim is to shape new forms of pedagogy that engage directly with the pressing challenges of our time—both in Lithuania and the Baltic Sea region, as well as here at MIT.”

For Urbonas, Lithuania offers a unique context: a small, agile nation with a thriving startup ecosystem, a robust influx of skilled migrants, and newly established energy independence from Russia.

“To change something on the scale of the U.S. requires enormous resources. But perhaps it’s possible in Lithuania,” he reflected. “It’s a unique laboratory—especially in areas like energy transition, agricultural innovation, climate resilience, and future manufacturing. MIT has the tech; Lithuania offers the field.”

What Urbonas suggests is more than geographical pragmatism—it’s a speculative reframing of scale, sovereignty, and systemic experimentation. In contrast to the inertia of superpowers, Lithuania presents the possibility of agile, integrated transformation. A country small enough to test radical ideas, yet networked enough to scale their implications.

Emerging from its Soviet-industrial legacy, Lithuania occupies a peculiar space: post-infrastructural and pre-exhausted. Its agricultural systems are still in flux, its manufacturing sector increasingly adaptive, and its commitment to renewables quietly ambitious. The post-socialist terrain becomes, in Urbonas’s words, “a porous interface between tradition and transformation.”

Within this context, collaboration between global research institutions and local ecosystems is not extractive but reciprocal. MIT brings technological foresight, but Lithuania offers the ground on which that foresight can be tested, grounded, reimagined.

“It’s not about exporting solutions,” Urbonas emphasizes. “It’s about co-designing futures—ones that are contextually intelligent, ecologically responsive, and socially embedded.”

In this framing, Lithuania is not a passive site—it’s an actor. A testbed not for techno-solutionism, but for epistemic humility and collective intelligence. A country not only with problems to solve, but with conditions to prototype new planetary logics.

Ultimately, MISTI Lithuania is more than a partnership. It is, in Urbonas’s words, a philosophical platform: “Lithuania values freedom, independence, and democracy. Whatever the future of science and cultural imagination, those are the values that will carry us forward.”

With that, MISTI Lithuania emerges not only as a model for educational and technological exchange, but as a call to imagine new futures – where art is not adjacent to innovation, but central to its evolution.