Biography

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Digital Humanities at UCLA. She earned her Ph.D. in History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a 2025-27 Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (New School) and a 2024-25 Visiting Research Fellow at Cambridge Visual Culture (Cambridge University). Her research attends to “ancestral intelligences”: feminist approaches to technology rooted in trans-generationally transmitted ways of knowing. This approach intervenes in dominant imaginaries of artificial intelligence to foreground knowledge systems that are subject to algorithmic and epistemic erasure, surfaced from the lacunae of omissive datasets and archives of dispossession. She is the author of The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books, 2022), an artist book and work of speculative feminist media theory structured as a series of lectures on data justice delivered in an indeterminate future by “artificial killjoys.” Her creative projects, performances, and collaborations have been presented at the Centre Pompidou, the New Museum, the Palais de Tokyo, Massachusetts Museum of Art (MASS MoCA), the 2024 Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere.