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Arts Division
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Assistant Professor of Teaching; Art, Justice, and Digital Media
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Institute of the Arts and Sciences
Science & Justice Research Center
Social Sciences Division
Porter College
Teaching & Learning Center (TLC)
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Archives, Archival Practices
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Contemporary Art
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Digital Arts Research Center
DARC 302C
Wednesdays from 10:00-11:30 (virtual, drop-in)
Digital Arts Research Center
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. She also earned a certificate from the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as a Eugene Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s 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; Art, Justice, and Digital Media and serves as principal faculty in the Creative Technologies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz and serves as a Porter Faculty Fellow. She is a Teaching and Learning Faculty Fellow for AY 2025-2026 focused on experiential learning and 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 for developing 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 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 ongoing critical discussion through readings, reflections, and debate.
Her service to the field includes being a steward, mentor, and advocate to the 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 is a Gray Area Board of Directors member. She is also an advisor to art and culture organizations, including slash art, 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
2023 Group Exhibition: Hiding in Plain Sight, San Jose State University - Thompson Gallery, San Jose, CA
2022 Group Exhibition: Dreamseeds, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA
2021 Festival: REWIRE, The Hague, Netherlands
2019 Group Exhibition: Strange Temporalities, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria
2019 Group Exhibition: Reclaiming the Future, Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA
2018 Group Exhibition: Centre for Emotional Materiality, Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2017 Group Exhibition: OUT/LOOK & The Birth of The Queer, GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco, CA
2017 Group Exhibition: Public Square, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA
2017 Performance with artist Surabhi Saraf for Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland, CA
ART 20K: Intro to New Media and Digital Artmaking (Winter)
ART 106C: Stop Motion Animation (Fall)
CT 11: Digital Media Perspectives (Fall and Summer)
CT 101: Persuasion and Resistance: Power in Contemporary Digital Media (Fall)
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