Cynthia Fan was born in Durban in 1991 and grew up on the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal. She is a fine artist, writer and plant biologist whose work encompasses research, curation, and sculpture in the medium of plant arrangement.

She has a PhD in Plant Molecular Biology from the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, where her research focused on begonias. She is a contributing writer to The Plant magazine, a former artist-in-residence at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York City, and is one half of Pear_ed collective, which spends time with plants between Cape Town, London and Amsterdam.

Her plant sculpture work has been exhibited internationally. She lives in London.