our people

CURRENT

Stephanie Dinkins

Founder

Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Her work in AI and other mediums uses emerging technologies and social collaboration to work toward technological ecosystems based on care and social equity. Dinkins teaches at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art. Dinkins earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Studies Program.

Lauren Ruiz

Manager of Research and Operations

Lauren is a research-based multimedia artist interrogating perceptions of nature, authoritative systems, and their complex intersections with class, labor, and identity. Drawing from various modes of knowledge-making (historical data, scientific journals, climate fiction, and biblical texts) and her bodily logic, she creates immersive installations, digital soundscapes, web-based projects, and multimedia sculptures to understand and challenge perceptions of identity amidst unseen environments. Lauren examines spaces that can't fully be experienced by human perception; deciphering the reverberations of socioeconomic disparities, ecologic crises, religious, and political systems in both human and nonhuman lifeworlds.

Ria Rajan

FHS Graduate Assistant

Ria Rajan is an Intermedia artist working across analog and digital mediums, focussing on the intimate relationships between people, places and the technosphere. Ria has been a fellow and artist - in - residence at the International Residency Exchange Program - Bamboo Curtain Studio, (Taipei), TIFA Working Studios (IN), Walkin Studios (IN), Jaaga, Figment (NY), Art-A-HACK (NY) and has been supported by cultural institutions such as the Goethe Institute and Alliance Francaise. She is also a part of the core creative team that organises Cyberia - a new media festival in Poona (IN), since it’s inception in 2019. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA in Studio Art at Stony Brook University, NY and is a Research Assistant at the Future Histories Studios.

Hagar Masoud

FHS Graduate Assistant

Hagar Masoud is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist, scholar, and storyteller who draws from her Cairo roots to inform her work. Her research-based practice incorporates sound art, sculpture, installation, video, technology such as Artificial intelligence (AI), and extended reality. Masoud investigates questions of gentrification, childhood trauma, and collective memory to reflect on their effect on the body. Her work negotiates the way the body, sexuality, gender, place, trauma, and violence intersect in the aftermath of such horrors. By adopting new media and oral history as methodologies, Masoud re-contextualizes socio-political commentary and cultural transformations.

ALUMNI

Diana Mulan Zhu

FHS Graduate Assistant & DISCO Graduate Fellow

Diana Mulan Zhu is a second-generation Chinese-American artist, visual activist, filmmaker, technologist, and scholar seeking to understand identity, the body, gender, and the digital gaze through painting, video art, performance, and installation. She holds a BA in Studio Art and Computer Science from Vanderbilt University and an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU. Diana has screened and exhibited her work in New York and at international venues including Anthology Film Archives and Prisma Estudio. Diana Mulan Zhu is currently pursuing her MFA in Art at SUNY Stony Brook University. Diana Mulan Zhu works and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Josie Williams

FHS Research Assistant & DISCO Graduate Fellow

Josie Williams is an afro-nowist, creative technologist, and founder of Algorithmic Equity, an interactive digital platform that empowers any New Yorker to report, record, or respond to law enforcement behavior. Currently, she is an MFA at Stony Brook University where she is also participating in a research fellowship with Stephanie Dinkins at the Future Histories Studio. Her primary interests revolve around artificial intelligence, data equity, cultivating Black radical imagination, and creating sentient-centered AI.

EXTENDED FAMILY

Coleman Collins

FHS Artist in Residence & DISCO Fellow

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