A colorful graphic in warm purple tones, around a (human) heart entwine flowers and four hands connected with threads.
© Clarote
A colorful graphic in warm purple tones, around a (human) heart entwine flowers and four hands connected with threads.
© Clarote
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Biographies of Future of Code Politics

The list is sorted alphabetically by first name.

Ayantu Tibeso is a scholar focusing on transnational Indigenous Oromo knowledge production and archival erasure in the construction of Ethiopian national narratives. She is a Cota-Robles Fellow and doctoral student in Information Studies at UCLA with a concentration in archival studies. Her primary research interests explore the intersections of archives, historical knowledge production, and indigenous knowledge and recordkeeping systems. Her work is rooted in African contexts with Ethiopia at the center of much of her analysis. She is passionate about decolonizing knowledge and revaluing and harnessing indigenous knowledge for the well being of communities globally.

Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez (they/them/elle in Spanish, pronounced ay-yay) uses their art & facilitation to transform individual witness into collective action. As a queer, transnational adoptee, their work resists ways the state hijacks individual & collective bodies to fulfill performances of power across imaginary borders & boundaries. Lundberg Torres Sánchez’s work has been shown in the U.S. at the Queens Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, The Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, RISD Museum, and the Knockdown Center to name a few. Their work has been presented internationally in Montreal, Mexico City, Santiago de Querétaro, São Paulo, Lima, and La Paz. They are the founder of the performance and exhibition series, Se Aculilló?, and the co-founder of You Are Holding This: an abolitionist zine for and by adopted and fostered people. Lundberg Torres Sánchez was the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2017 and 2018 Merit Fellow in New Genres and Film & Video respectively.

Denise Alves-Rodrigues is a self-taught technologist, visual artist and amateur astronomer, residing in São Paulo-SP. She started her arts studies in Ribeirão Preto - SP, and got her bachelor's degree in Visual Arts at Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo. She invents devices (electronic or not) and instruments for creating other educational methodologies. She is interested in the generation, collection and distortion of data and materials, researching the frictions between technique and representation. She has been awarded with residences in Brazil and Latin America such as JACA-BH, Spa das Artes, Cloud-RJ and Itaú Experience Program. Collective exhibitions: FARSA (SESC Pompeia - São Paulo / Brazil), Iminência de Tragédia (Funarte - São Paulo / Brazil), Linda Cortile (Galeria Zielinsky - Barcelona / Spain), Topologies of the Future @ Present (Athens / Greece), Art en Órbita (Centro de Arte Contemporáneo - Quito / Ecuador), Poéticas de Laboratório.sobre prácticas artísticas de código abierto (CAS Center of the Arts of Seville - Spain), VIII Biennial of La Paz (Bolivia). Individual Exhibitions: Vocation to Ruin: proof of study (Darling Pearls / Uk), Há uma Esfinge entre Nós (Sé Galeria - Brasil) and O Vazio é Todo Meu (CCSP - Brasil). Residences: KIOSKO - Bolivia, Residencia de la Tierra - Colombia and Ybytu - Brazil.

Dorothy Roberts is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law at the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies. Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and bioethics. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.

Eli Wewentxu is a non-binary Mapuche artist, born in Wallmapu, who studied music performance at the UACH Conservatory in Valdivia and took lessons with various teachers in Brazil, Netherlands, Spain and Germany. Eli currently lives in Berlin as a violinist, composer, performer and violin teacher. Eli explores themes of identity, decolonial-social resistance and seeks new ways of creating music with and from the body, focusing on a critique of the hegemonic, elitist image of Western violin technique. Eli is part of the collective Mapuche Mawvn in Berlin.

Gabriela Damián is a writer of narrative and essay, a professor of journalism, film and literature at CENTRO university and (according to her bio) the imaginary granddaughter of Ursula K. Le Guin. She is part of the international writing programme Under the Volcano. She is co-founder of the art and science collective Cúmulo de Tesla, a collective that wishes to strengthen the relationships between art, science, and science fiction, as well as the Encuentro de Escritoras y Cuidados and MexiCona: imaginación y futuro. She was the winner of the last edition of the James Tiptree, Jr. award for Dreaming in the Garden. Gabriela Damián has published short stories in several anthologies in Spanish. You can find her work in English in Three Messages and a Warning, an anthology of contemporary Mexican stories of the fantastic (Small Beer Press, 2010) and in A Larger Reality. Speculative Fiction from the Bicultural margins, an anthology of 14 stories, presented in both Spanish and English.

Genesis Victoria non-binary latinx artist and researcher, born in Santiago, Chile (1989) and based in Berlin. Their artwork involves sound art and performance art as an interdisciplinary practice. From diverse ways of experimentation, they explore the artistic possibilities of embodiments in the aesthetic flux. In real-time compositions, Génesis creates atmospheres overlapping senses, sound and materialities. Thus, they seek to interfere with visual hierarchy and achieve different forms of sound knowledge and poetics. In their performances, listening became a primary instance of connection with inhabiting. Through diverse mediums, they explore space acoustics and sound sensitivity, inquiring issues related to identity, virtuality, technologies and contemporary embodiments. They use diverse objects and digital tools in order to produce analog and digital dialogs. Bachelor in Art, Theory and History of Arts, University of Chile. Pursuing a Master’s degree in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts program at Universität der Künste Berlin.

Gracen Brilmyer (they/them) is a Disabled researcher working at the intersection of feminist disability studies and archival studies. Their work investigates the erasure of disabled people in archives primarily within the history of natural history museums and colonial histories as well as how disabled people experience themselves in archival material. With a background in design and digital archives, they are the founder of the Disability Archives Lab which hosts multi-disciplinary projects and research initiatives that center the politics of disability, how disabled people are affected by archival representation, and how to imagine archival futures that are centered around disabled desires. They are currently working on The Labour of Belonging, a research project that uses interviews with disabled archivists to investigate ableism in the archival profession, and The Crip Futures Archive, a collaborative digital platform for disabled people to archive themselves. They are currently assistant professor at McGill University, and their work has been published in journals such as Archival Science, Archivaria, and The Journal of Feminist Scholarship. For more: gracenbrilmyer.com

Jane Shi is a queer Chinese settler living on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. She is a poet, writer, editor, and organizer whose work appears in Disability Visibility Blog, Briarpatch Magazine, grunt gallery, CV2 Magazine, is forthcoming in Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press), and so on. She was shortlisted for The Malahat Review's 2022 Open Season Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She organizes Masks4EastVan (@Masks4EastVan), a neighbourhood fund that distributes N95 masks and educational materials, and is the author of the chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Rahila’s Ghost Press). She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.

J. Khadijah Abdurahman (they/them/any) is an abolitionist whose research focus is predictive analytics in the New York City child welfare system and tech in the Horn of Africa. They are the founder of We Be Imagining, a public interest technology project at Columbia University’s INCITE Center and The American Assembly’s Democracy and Trust Program. WBI draws on the Black radical tradition to develop public technology through infusing academic discourse with the performance arts in partnership with community based organizations. Khadijah co-founded the Otherwise School: Tools and Techniques of Counter-Fascism alongside Sucheta Ghoshal’s Inquilab at the University of Washington, HCDE. They’ve most recently guest edited Logic Magazine: Beacons and ACM Interactions: Unmaking Democracy. Their most recent writings can be found in The Funambulist and Columbia’s Law and Race Journal.

Joana Varon is a Brazilian, with Colombian ancestry, and a nomad’s heart, Joana is a feminist researcher and activist focused on bringing decolonial Latin American perspectives in the search of feminist techno-political frameworks for shaping the development, deployment, and usages of technologies. She is the Founder Directress and Creative Chaos Catalyst at Coding Rights; Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from Harvard Kennedy School and affiliated to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Former Mozilla Media Fellow, believing in art, creativity, and coding as tools for revolutions, she is co-creator of several creative projects operating in the interplay between activism, arts, and technologies, such as transfeministech.org, museamami.org, chupadados.com, #SaferSisters, #SaferSisters, Safer Nudes, From Devices to Bodies, among others. More on @CodingRights and @joana_varon.

Kalundi Serumaga is a historian, journalist, filmmaker and cultural activist. Among others he is the associate editor of the New African, an English language monthly news magazine based in the UK. His work has been published in leading African literary magazines such as Kwani? and the africa report. He has previously served as the Director (Artistic and Administrative) of Uganda National Cultural Centre (1998- 2003). Under his leadership, the Centre became well known as a place of intellectual-cultural growth, decolonisation and entertainment. He was one of the creative minds behind very popular Ugandan soaps such as That is Life Mwattu, or Entebbe. Kalundi Serumaga has also taught at Makerere University, Uganda. He became renowned also as the host of the Radio One talkshow »Spectrum«. Since the September riots 2009 Kalundi has been arrested and assaulted for publicly airing his political views. Having lived in exile in Kenya and the UK, he also knows »a thing or two« about being a refugee.

Kupalua is an artist from Brazil, interested in the transdisciplinarity between performance art, composition, voice and video. Investigating power dynamics between and within bodies, Kupalua problematizes female behavior expectations and the institutionalization of human relations. With sounds, coming from the most interior places such as the cervix or from the deepest spot in the Ocean, Kupalua is a physical experience, sound waves trespass your body and voices whisper to your bones other notions of darkness, womanhood, alien and terrain possibilities. Kupalua is one of the artists on the concept and performer of the piece Macaquinhos which had a polemic repercussion in Brazil and was shown in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Brussel, Wien, Salvador, Cariri and São Paulo. Also on the concept and soundtrack of their current piece ZOO commissioned by Mousonturm. Kupalua is the name of their music solo project shown around Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Athens, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, Heliodora and São Paulo.

Lena Kollender (she/her) is a dramaturge and curator for theatre, performance, dance and discourse. She studied literature, theatre studies and dramaturgy in Berlin, Paris and Hamburg. From 2013 to 2021, she worked for the Kampnagel International Summer Festival in Hamburg, where she was involved in the last edition of THE FUTURE OF CODE POLITICS, as well as numerous artistic projects and discourse formats. Since the beginning of 2022 she has been working as a dramaturge at Sophiensaele Berlin. In her spare time she is also an activist for reproductive justice.

Lilith Wittmann is a software developer, IT security expert and activist from Berlin who describes herself as a »riot influencer«. Lilith deals with security research - usually in state infrastructure - and data liberation. She gained wider media attention by exposing security vulnerabilities in the German COVID-19 Luca app and the election campaign app CDU connect of the German conservative political party. The CDU's federal executive filed criminal charges against her in July, although her actions aligned with the concept of Responsible Disclosure, a responsible way of disclosing security vulnerabilities. Lilith Wittmann is a member of the zerforschung group, which investigates the security of information technology systems, among other things.

liú méi-zhì chen (they/them) is a queer, trans non-binary, disabled, Abolitionist nerd, descended from the islands of Taiwan and Ireland. They are currently the Oral History Archive Manager at the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago. They view storytelling and oral history as key strategies for thawing trauma, empowering connection, and creating radical change. Their personal work focuses on anti-imperialism, queer/trans liberation, the heterogeneity of Asian and Asian/American identities, Black/Asian coalition movements, and the textures of silence and absence. Their Master’s thesis about asian queer kinship can be heard at www.tidalflats.xyz.

Lorena Jaume-Palasí is a researcher and activist working in the field of technology and ethics. Lorena is member of the International Advisory Board of the Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA) of the European Parliament. 2020 the government of her home country Spain appointed her to the National Council on Artificial Intelligence. She is currently involved in the nonprofit »non-organization« she initiated, The Ethical Tech Society. There, she focuses on issues of public interest and practices of power at the intersection of technology, ethics and regulation. As a co-founder of the Algorithm- Watch initiative, she received the Theodor Heuss Medal in 2018 »for her contribution to a differentiated view of algorithms and their mechanisms of action.«

Lu Ain-Zaila is an educator and Afrofuturist author of »Duologia Brasil 2408 - (In)Verdades e(R)Evolução« (2016-2017), »Sankofia« (2018) and »Ìségún« (2019) as well as numerous short stories in anthologies and research papers related to education and literature. She focuses on the importance of imagining and realizing afrofutures and positive futures on the peripheries and margins. She has published tales based in the context of the Brazilian law 10.639/03 - a law that was considered an actual landmark in the adoption of public policies and affirmative actions for recognizing the ethnic and racial diversity in Brazilian education - as well as black narratives focused on philosophical, cultural, historical, mythological and humanistic black values.

Lucia Egaña Rojas is a Chilean artist who currently lives in Barcelona. In addition to her artistic practice, she also works in writing, research, teaching, and audiovisual production. Her work problematizes the relationship between high and low culture, high-tech and low-fi, public and private space, and the relationship between North and South. She studied visual arts in Chile, and did a master’s degree in creative documentary and a PhD in post-pornography in Spain. She is part of Instituto de Estudios del Porno, Cooperativa de técnicas, Musea M.A.M.I., Pluriversidad Nómada among other collectives. At the same time, she is developing two research projects, besides embroideries, videos and performances. For more: luciaegana.net

Mariah Rafaela Silva is a social activist and human rights advocate socially recognized in Brazil and abroad. She researches digital media, gender violence and processes of subjectivation. Mariah Rafaela Silva is currently officer of the program for political participation at the Race and Equality Institute in Brazil. She was a researcher at the Center for Studies on Security and Citizenship (Cesec), at the NGO Grupo Conexão G de Cidadania LGBT de favelas, where she remains a volunteer at the Observatory of LGBT Violence in Favelas. Mariah Rafaela Silva has a degree in Art History and holds a master degree in History, Theory and Criticism of Culture. At the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, she studied gender, migration and globalization. She was also a professor at the Department of History and Theory of Art at Universidad Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

Mia Mingus is a community educator and builder for transformative justice and disability justice. In 2020 she founded and leads SOIL: A Transformative Justice Project which works to build the conditions for TJ. She is passionate about building the skills, relationships and structures that can transform violence, harm and abuse within our communities and that do not rely on or replicate the punitive system we currently live in. Mia Mingus has received numerous awards, among others 2013 she was recognized by President Barack Obama as one of the API women's Champion of Change. 2020 she was awarded a Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation. For more, visit her blog, Leaving Evidence.

Moira Millan: »I am a woman, I am Mapuche, I live in Puelwillimapu, in a country today whitewashed with European make-up called Argentina. I have dedicated my whole life to the struggle for land, dignity and the rights of my people. I see myself in the eyes of my sisters of all the native peoples who struggle to pass on their identity to their children, and to recover the art of inhabiting. In 2012, I began to walk the territories, to meet with women from different communities of indigenous peoples in Argentina, actions that were consolidated in 2015 with the formation of the Movimiento de Mujeres Indígenas por el Buen Vivir, which represents 36 native nations. I wrote and published my first novel in the winter of 2019, «El tren del olvido» (The train of oblivion) and I am currently writing my second novel. For 20 years I have been supporting the territorial recovery of Pillán Mahuiza, Chubut, Puelwillimapu. I have not accepted positions or perks, I don't want privileges. I want rights for all. I am the bearer of many collective dreams and I want to walk them with all of you.«

NEVE (Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco) (they/(s)he) is a multigender, multiracial, multiply Disabled, multidimensional, multidisciplinary terpsichorean artist of the stage, street, field, stream, and screen. They are an Indigenous African who grew up in Lenni Lenape country and is now living in Duwamish and Coast Salish lands and traveling wherever they have access and an invitation. (S)He is a 2020 Pina Bausch Fellow, a 2022 Arc Artist Fellow, and now a 2022 Disability Futures Fellow! NEVE loves life, the delights and pains of embodiment and love, the sparkle-ache and promise of growth, the higher power inside all of us, the earth's lullabies and war cries, drinking color, and kissing/thinking/dreaming/learning/winning with their local and international queer family (especially their cat child Caravaggio). NEVE believes in God(exxes), Collective Access and Liberation, Transformative Justice, Land Back, Right of Return, Reparations, Anarchism (in relationships and governance), the Loch Ness Monster, the Multiverse, the concept that all living beings are people, and 
You. They are currently a contributing writer for the South Seattle Emerald and collaborate with their confidante in arms, fellow Seattle multidisciplinary artist Saira Barbaric as themselves, and as Mouthwater. Visit them online at nevebebad.com, and on social medias at @nevethoh.

Panteha Abareshi’s interdisciplinary studio practice and research-based scholarly work are rooted in their own existence as a sick, disabled, queered body. Through installation-based sculptural and performance-video works, Abareshi critically examines the nuances of objectification within the crip experience, and makes material of their own disabled body. In Abareshi’s practice there is a constant experimentation in withholding/over-extending of vulnerability, control, access - as a means of making the viewer hyper-aware of their own body, and actively employing accessibility as a tool. Abareshi is currently exploring disability eroticism and the disabled body as fetish object. 2021 they were awarded the VSA Emerging Artists Competition, by the Kennedy Center. Panteha Abareshi’s work has been exhibited a.o. in New York, London, Frankfurt, Dresden and Los Angeles.

Paola Ricaurte is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Digital Culture at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City and a digital rights activist. She was a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (2018-2019) and an Edmundo O'Gorman fellow in the Institute for Latin American Studies (2018), Columbia University. Her work focuses on the critical study of digital technologies. Her publications include »Data Epistemologies, The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance« (2019), »Youth and Digital Culture: Critical Approaches from Latin America« (2018), »Pedagogies for the Open Knowledge Society« (2016), »Challenges to collective action in the post-Snowden era: visions from Latin America« (2015), »Control societies: techno-surveillance and civic resistance in Mexico« (2014). She was the author of the »Freedom on the Net report for Mexico« (2017). Together with Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejías, she is the founder of Tierra Común(www.tierracomun.net/), a network of activists, citizens and scholars who work on interventions for data decolonization.

Paz Peña is an activist working at the intersection between digital technologies, feminism, and social justice. She is the co-creator of different instances of reflection-action, such as the Notmy.ai initiative that seeks to collectively create a framework for feminist reflection on Artificial Intelligence developments in Latin America and the Latin American Institute of Terraforming a space for understanding the varied relationships between digital technology and the climate crisis. Paz also co-created acoso.online a comprehensive resource for victims of online gender-based violence and is the Ex Advocacy Director of the digital rights NGO @derechosdigital.

Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator. Their work investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. Romi has exhibited work and given talks at numerous exhibitions, conferences, and workshops around the world including Transmediale (Berlin), Tribeca Film Festival, the American Institute of Architects (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Their writing has appeared in publications by MIT Press, University of California Press, Open Humanities Press, and Logic Magazine. They are currently an Annenberg Fellow in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC in Los Angeles.

Şeyda Kurt is a freelance journalist, book author and moderator. She studied philosophy and Romance languages and literature in Cologne and Bordeaux, and cultural journalism at the University of the Arts in Berlin. In her non-fiction bestseller »Radikale Zärtlichkeit - Warum Liebe politisch ist« (Radical Tenderness - Why Love is Political), she explores norms of love and forms of relationships in the force field of capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism. She was awarded the 2021 Grimme Online Award as part of the team for her contribution to the Spotify Original Podcast 190220 - A Year After Hanau. Şeyda Kurt speaks and writes about local and international politics, leftist feminism, culture and cultural politics, and new visions of togetherness.

Thaina Iná grew up in Maré, has a degree in Dance Theory from UFRJ and training in audiovisual. She calls herself a "espirituartista", as she seeks to integrate different languages to capture essences and establish a connection through art with "the whole in everything". She is also part of the collective Ocultas de tarot e magias and develops a production support work for other independent artists in the Performídia project. To learn more about the work of the multi-artist: https://www.espirituartista.soy

Victoria Copeland is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social Welfare and organizer/partner with the Cops Off Campus Coalition, UC Survivors + Allies, Let’s Get Free LA Coalition, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and Defund MPD Coalition. Her research within and outside of the academy is rooted in Black feminist abolitionist epistemology and focuses on the use of multi-system data infrastructures, predictive analytics, and surveillance in decision-making processes. Her dissertation work, Dismantling the Carceral Ecosystem: Investigating the Role of »Child Protection« and Family Policing in Los Angeles was conducted in partnership with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Downtown Women’s Action Coalition to better understand the role and impact of the »child welfare« system, its use of predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, and to chart different pathways towards an abolitionist future.

Walela Nehanda is a Black non binary, disabled, demisexual, queer, cultural worker, nationally renowned writer, cancer & stem cell transplant survivor. Walela discovered spoken word poetry in 2013, at just 19 years old. Over the years, Walela has been featured in publications: named in Out 100 List of 2020, Teen Vogue, The Guardian, Nylon, Vice i-D, SELF Magazine. Through Walela’s time organizing, Walela has learned their poetry must act in service to the movement as a means to shift consciousness and communicate nuance in an accessible manner.

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (Ayutla Mixe, 1981) is a member of COLMIX, a collective of young Mixe people who carry out research and dissemination activities on Mixe language, history and culture. She studied Hispanic Language and Literature and studied a Master's degree in Linguistics at the UNAM. She has collaborated in various projects on the dissemination of linguistic diversity, the development of grammatical content for educational materials in indigenous languages, and projects for the documentation of and attention to languages at risk of disappearing. She has been involved in the development of written material in Mixe and in the creation of Mixe-speaking readers and other indigenous languages. She has been involved in activism for the defense of the linguistic rights of speakers of indigenous languages, in the use of indigenous languages in the virtual world and in literary translation. 2021 together with the actor Gael García Bernal, she starred in a documentary series streamed at Netflix called »El tema« (The Issue). The documentary series portrays Mexico's climate crisis through the stories and experiences of environmental activists, human rights defenders, indigenous communities and civil society organizations.

Yela Quim is a sociologist by training, rapper (singer-songwriter). She believes in art as a path of struggle, resistance, enjoyment and healing from the wounds of war and macho violence. »Resistimos a la Guerra« is her first album and is »making waves in the South American independent music scene« (remezcla magazine). The album is inspired by the context of war in her country, it is a cry of struggle and resistance for women's rights and sexual and gender dissidence. Her political-artistic commitment makes visible the defence of joy, to which she sings and raps with decolonial discourses from lesbofeminism, fat activism and the struggle for free abortion.