Profile
Fabiola Hanna is a new media artist, software theorist, and Assistant Professor of Emerging Media at the School of Media Studies at The New School. She is a hybrid theory/practitioner whose work engages the theory of digital media with a focus on software that interfaces with archives of memories of the past.
Fabiola holds a PhD in Film and Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz where she also completed an MFA in Digital Arts & New Media. She has several forthcoming publications on these topics including a chapter on how non-Western contexts can help rethink software studies. Her work has been published in Feminist Media Histories and Sounding Out. She is working towards a special issue on activist interactive documentary in the non-Western world. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, the New Children’s Museum in San Diego, the SubZero Festival in San Jose, the Digital Arts Research Center in Santa Cruz, and the MakerFaire in San Mateo.
She was 2018-2019 Data and Democracy fellow at The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. She is also leading the development of a core curriculum for coding literacies for all incoming students at UC Santa Cruz. In 2018, she co-organized a symposium on Digital Surveillance at UC Santa Cruz. In 2015, she was an inaugural Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at The New School for Social Research. Previously, she was the educational program manager at the MIT FabLab in San Diego.
Degrees Held
University of California Santa Cruz | PhD, Film and Digital Media
University of California Santa Cruz | MFA, Digital Arts and New Media
University of California San Diego | BA, Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts
Recent Publications
“How Lebanon’s Contested Histories Can Inform Software Studies,” Rethinking Media Through the Middle East, American University of Beirut, Lebanon. (forthcoming)
“Designing a Genealogy of Feminist Media Studies.” in Feminist Media Histories, special
issue on “Genealogies,”edited by Miranda Banks, Ralina L. Joseph, Shelley Stamp & Michele White (Spring 2018)
“Share your story” – but who will listen? Sounding Out! Sound Studies Blog. August 22. https://soundstudiesblog.com/2016/08/22/18160
Performances and Appearances
Recent Conference Presentations
Symposia Organized
2018 War, Security and Digital Media, Symposium and Art Exhibition, UC Santa Cruz, February 17-18
Panels Organized
2017
“Structures of Activist Interactive Documentary in the Global South.” with Anandana Kapur and Karl Mendonca. Poetics and Politics: A Documentary Research Symposium, Sussex University, Brighton, UK, June 2-4
“Activist Interactive Documentary in the Global South” with Ersan Ocak, Amir Husak and Anandana Kapur. Video Vortex XI. Video in Flux: Art, Activism, Archives. Kochi, India, February 23-26
Papers Presented
2018
“Impossible Conversations about Histories of Lebanon,” panel on “Memory and Mediation in Lebanon: Commodifying and Consuming Images of the Past.” Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX, November 15-18
“Translating Conversations into A Software-Based Documentary” panel on “Coding Conversations,” Visible Evidence XXV, Bloomington, IN, August 8-11
2017
“A Case Study of Automated Curation of Digital Archives.” Poster presentation. DH2017. Co-organised by McGill University and the Université de Montréal. Montréal, Canada, August 8-11
“Curating a Digital Archive using Conversation as Metaphor,” Digital Methodologies Workshop, Marra.tein, Beirut, Lebanon, July 4-6
“How Lebanon’s Contested Histories Can Inform Software Studies,” Rethinking Media Through the Middle East Conference, American University of Beirut, Lebanon, January 12-13
2016
“Intersecting Interactive Documentary with Narrative Intelligence,” Panel on “Documents and Intelligence,” Visible Evidence XXIII, Bozeman, MT, August 11-14
“Softwares, Histories, Memories and Archives,” HASTAC 2016 - Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory Conference - Tempe, AZ, May 12
“Imagined Conversations about Histories of Modern Lebanon” - Machines for Thinking interactive approaches to non-fiction archives, i-docs symposium, Brighton, UK, March 4
“Gilles Bloch and Automatic Editing Machines,” Humanities and Critical Code Studies Working Group 2016 (4th Biennial), Online at University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, January 18-February 14
2015
“interacting?” Reconsidering The Aesthetics of Interactive Documentary (workshop) - Visible Evidence XXII, Toronto, Canada, August 19-22
“Imagined Conversations about Histories of Modern Lebanon.” Fire Alarms: On History. Poetics and Politics: A Documentary Research Symposium, Santa Cruz, CA, May 15-17
“Conversation Aesthetics: Imagining Histories of Modern Lebanon.” Digital Humanities Working Group, University of California, Santa Cruz, May 11
“Liveness in Art and Technology Practice” Workshop - Participatory Cartography in Digital Practices, co-organized by Sally Jane Norman and Emile Devereaux, University of Sussex, March 18
“How New Media Art and Lebanese History Coincide,” Presentation at University of Sussex, Exchange program, March 17
“Two Questions concerning Designing Software for Documentaries.” Emerging Documentary Practices Symposium, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, February 26
2014
Panel on “Digital Practice and Database Aesthetics” at the “Politics of the Digital: Poetry, Technology, and the University,” University of California, Santa Cruz, February
Research Interests
Digital Media, Practice and Theory; Software Studies; Archives and Historical Justice; Activist Art and Documentary; Digital Storytelling