Steve Kurtz is an American artist and co-founder of the art collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). His work with CAE is considered pioneering in the areas of politically engaged art, interventionist practices, and cultural research and action in the field of biotechnology and ecological struggle. He is also a writer and educator. Kurtz's arrest in 2004 for suspected “bioterrorism” is the subject of a film, Strange Culture, by Lynn Hershman Leeson, and served as inspiration for the novel Orfeo by Richard Powers.