Image description: A smiling Filipino person with short hair wearing clear glasses, a short sleeve gray t-shirt with neon green text that reads “Thinking Like an Archipelago Edouard Glissant 1928-2011,” and black pants sitting against a backdrop of plants and iridescent decor.
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Dorothy R. Santos, Ph. D. (she/they) is a Filipino-American writer, artist, and media scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Computational Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is an Assistant Professor of Teaching focused on Art, Justice, and Digital Media in the Art Department and Core Faculty for the Creative Technologies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and media scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Computational Media 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 an Assistant Professor of Teaching focused on Art, Justice, and Digital Media in the Art Department and Core Faculty for the Creative Technologies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
She is a 2024-2026 Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council focused on emergency infrastructure, crisis and disaster response.
Her creative and research interests include voice recognition, speech technologies, assistive tech, radio, sound production, feminist media histories, and critical medical anthropology. 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.
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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 an Assistant Professor of Teaching focused on Art, Justice, and Digital Media in the Art Department and Core Faculty for the Creative Technologies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In her previous appointment, she served as 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 with the Social Science Research Council focused on emergency infrastructure, crisis and disaster response.
Her creative and research interests include voice recognition, speech technologies, assistive tech, radio, sound production, feminist media histories, and critical medical anthropology. 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 and Futures lab 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 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.
Her work has been supported by CalHumanities, Ford Foundation, The Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry, MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Social Science Research Council Just Tech Fellowship.
Advisors and Mentors
Doctoral: Soraya Murray, Ph.D. (Dissertation Chair) | Nathan Altice, Ph.D. | Nancy Chen, Ph.D. | Halcyon M. Lawrence, Ph.D. | Shelley Stamp, Ph.D.
Masters: Susan Gervitz | Eric Olson, Ph.D. | Tirza ‘True’ Latimer, Ph.D. | Soraya Murray, Ph.D.
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. 
