she/they
Arts Division
Assistant Professor of Teaching
Faculty
Arts Division
Art Department
Science & Justice Research Center
Social Sciences Division
Digital Arts Research Center
DARC 302E
Thursdays from 10-12 AM (Location: DARC 302E) and by appointment
Digital Arts Research Center
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. (she/they) is a Filipino American storyteller, poet, artist, and scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Computational Media and a certificate from the Science and Justice Research Center from the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor for the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a 2024-2026 Just Tech Fellow through the Social Sciences Research Council.
Her creative and research interests include voice recognition, speech technologies, assistive tech, radio, sound production, feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, race, and gender. In 2022, she received the Mozilla Creative Media Award to develop her interactive, docu-poetics work The Cyborg’s Prosody (2022). Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Rewire Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Natalie and James Thompson Gallery, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Slate, and Vice Motherboard. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture.
During the global COVID-19 pandemic, artists Lee Blalock, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and Santos formed their creative research collective Biolectics as a way to share work, exchange ideas, and provide creative support for one another. She is also co-founder and co-host of Five & Nine, a podcast newsletter at the intersection of magic, career and economic justice that provides an an ongoing critical discussion through readings, reflections, and debate.
Her service to the field includes being a steward and mentor to Collective Action School (formerly known as Logic School), an online, experimental school for tech workers produced by Logic Foundation with support from Processing Foundation. She also co-founded REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation and a member of the Governance Board for Gray Area. She is also an advisor to art and culture organizations including slash art, POWRPLNT, Looking Glass, and House of Alegria.
feminist media histories, computational media, critical medical anthropology, digital technology, race, ethics, voice recognition, speech technologies, computational linguistics, biotechnology
contemporary art history, media studies, digital technologies, cultural studies, visual studies, writing, creative writing, experimental writing, docu-poetics, archival research, games, table top role playing
- 2024-2026 Social Science Research Council, Just Tech Initiative, Fellow
- 2022 Mozilla Creative Media Award
- 2021-2022 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Fellow
- 2022 Banff, Centre for Art and Creativity, Artist in Residence
- 2021-2022 Ford Foundation, New Media Leadership Initiative, Grantee