OZ Orlando Tongyue Zhu is a social anthropologist of refrigeration/cooling technologies, material culture, and everyday political life. Her research examines what happens when technologies of cooling intervene in the ordinary temporalities of living, including how people store and preserve, defer loss, anticipate scarcity, and imagine futures through technologies designed to hold material change at bay.
Orlando was awarded her PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2026. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing during the COVID-19 restrictions, her doctoral research followed refrigeration from cold-chain infrastructures into urban homes, asking how practices of storing, preserving, and discarding food give material form to memories of scarcity, generational experience, labour and migration, and changing expectations of the future. Through the refrigerator, the project examines how broader political and economic transformations are domesticated within the rhythms of everyday life. Her doctoral fieldwork was supported by a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, alongside funding for curatorial and public-engagement work arising from the project.
Within the CryoCultures project, Orlando turns from the refrigeration of food to the cryopreservation of biological life. Her research focuses on biomedical cryotechnologies, following frozen gametes, cells, tissues, and biospecimens as they move through clinics, laboratories, storage facilities, and cold chains. She is interested in the temporalities these technologies promise and produce, namely how freezing makes possible particular forms of postponement, preservation, anticipation, and uncertainty; how the circulation and storage of frozen biological materials reshape social and political relations; and how intimate hopes, attachments, losses, and dilemmas become bound up with the technical infrastructures that sustain life at low temperatures.