People

Aubrey Anable is Associate Professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University. A scholar of visual culture, her research examines digital media aesthetics, video games, and computational culture. She is the author of Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect,  winner of the 2019 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Best First Book award, and co-editor of A Concise Companion to Visual Culture. She serves as Advisory Editor for the journals Camera Obscura and Television and New Media.

Edward Jones-Imhotep is Professor and Director at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. A historian of the social and cultural life of machines, he writes about topics ranging from 18^th-century artificial life to the technological geographies of the Cold War. He is particularly interested in underrepresented histories of technology: histories of the Black technological self and the technological underground; and histories of technological failure — breakdowns, malfunctions, accidents — and what they reveal about the place of machines and the stakes of machine failures in the culture, politics, and economics of modern societies. He is co-editor (with Rebecca Slayton and Wiebe Bijker) of MIT Press’s Inside Technology series and a co-founder of Toronto’s TechnoScience Salon, a public forum for humanities-based discussions about science and technology.

Jacob Gallagher-Ross is Associate Professor and Chair of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and the author of Theaters of the Everyday (Northwestern University Press, 2018). A contributing editor of Theater, Yale’s journal of theater criticism, reportage, and new plays, he is a guest co-editor of three special issues about theater and new media: Digital Dramaturgies (2012), Digital Feelings (2016), and Spectatorship in an Age of Surveillance (2018). He was for many years a frequent contributor to the Village Voice’s theater section and worked as a dramaturg at the Stratford Festival. He is the content consultant for Crash Course: Theater and Drama, a fifty-episode web series about theatre history produced by The Crash Course and PBS Digital. He is currently collaborating with Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson, the founders of NYC performance ensemble Big Art Group, on The Big Art Group Book, the first full-length volume devoted to their work, and writing a book about Interface Theatre with Miriam Felton-Dansky.

Kris Cohen is associate professor of art history and humanities at Reed College. He works onthe relationship between art, economy, and media technologies, focusing especially on theaesthetics of collective life. His first book, Never Alone, Except for Now (Duke University Press,2017), addresses these concerns in the context of electronic networks. His second book,The Human in Bits (Duke UP, 2025), accounts for how a group of black artists working from the sixties tothe present were addressing nascent configurations of the computer screen and the formsof labor and personhood associated with those configurations.

Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Professor in the Department of American Culture and the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of six books on digital media, race, gender, and industry including Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, winner of the 2010 Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Cultural Studies, and a co-founder of the DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration and Optimism) Network at disconetwork.org. Her new book The Inattention Economy: Women of Color, Digital Labor, and the Internet is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2025.

Negin Dahya is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and Faculty of Information. Her research areas include studies of migration and technology with a focus on refugee experiences and learning environments. Dahya adopts socio-technical theory, postcolonial theory, and feminist theory to analyse and interpret qualitative and community-based research. Her earlier work focused on digital media production with racialized young people in Canada and USA.

Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. In addition, he is Archives Director of the Sexual Representation Collection, administered by the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. Professor Keilty’s research interests can be divided into two areas. The first is the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries. The second is the materiality of media in erotohistoriography. He has published on embodiment and technology, data science, the history of information retrieval, design and experience, graphic design, temporality, and sexual taxonomies. His work spans visual culture, sexual politics, science and technology studies, media studies, information studies, political economy, critical theory, and theories of gender, sexuality, and race.

Rafael Grohmann is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media/UTSC and Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. He is leader of DigiLabour initiative, founding editor of Platforms & Society journal, and research associate at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on digital labour, AI and work, AI in cultural sector, workers’ organizing, platform cooperativism and digital solidarity economy. Currently, he is co-lead of Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster, principal investigator of the SSRC-funded projects Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP) and Workers Governing Digital Technologies.

Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of the Top Books of 2023 by FRIEZE. Anteaesthetics brings continental philosophy, art history, film theory, critical theories of race, and the philosophy of media to bear on multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema to contemporary video installations and digital art. Bradley is an Advisory Editor at Camera Obscura and serves on the Advisory Board of October.

Sara Grimes is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy and a Full Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. She is the Director and Founder of the Kids Play Tech Lab, and Principal Investigator of the SSHRC-funded Children and Age-Appropriate Game Design Project. Her research and teaching are centered in the areas of children’s digital media culture(s) and children’s rights in the digital environment, with a focus on games. Her award-winning book, Digital Playgrounds: The Hidden Politics of Children’s Online Play Spaces, Virtual Worlds, and Connected Games, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021. She is currently working on a new book, Kidfluenced, under contract with the University of California Press, about children as creators of digital games, media and other content.

Sarah Bay-Cheng (she/they, Ph.D. University of Michigan) is Professor of Theatre & Performance Studies and Dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University. Researching intersections of performance and emerging technologies, current projects include Digital Historiography and Performance: Introductions & Provocations (University of Michigan Press) and “AI in Performance-making: New Frontiers in the Humanities” Contemporary Theatre Review, co-edited with Liam Jarvis and Aneta Mancewicz, and studies in arts data. Past publications include 4 books, most recently Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (University of Michigan Press, 2015).

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her research on digital media. She is author many books, including: Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and is currently a Visiting Professor. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and International Fellow of the British Academy. She has also held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

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Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans moving image, computation, theory, and installation. Recent exhibitions include the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2022); British Art Show 9 (2021); and Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI, de Young Museum (2020). His 2021 artist monograph Unknown Ideals is published by Sternberg Press. Blas holds a PhD from the Graduate Program in Literature, Duke University and an MFA from UCLA. He is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.