• Faculty

  • Fabiola Hanna

    Assistant Professor of Emerging Media

    Email
    hannaf@newschool.edu

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    Fabiola Hanna

    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


    Current Courses

    Media Practices: Programming
    NMDS 5444, Fall 2024

    Media Senior Project Lab
    NCOM 4000, Fall 2024

    Media Theory
    NMDS 5006, Fall 2024

    Future Courses

    Designing Methods for Media
    NMDS 5026, Spring 2025

    Software & Difference
    NMDS 5312, Spring 2025

    Past Courses

    Designing Methods for Media
    NMDS 5026, Spring 2024

    Independent Study
    NMDS 5920, Spring 2024

    Software & Difference
    NMDS 5312, Spring 2024

    Software & Difference
    LCST 4585, Spring 2024

    Thesis Supervision
    NMDS 5960, Spring 2024

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