Mona Hedayati

About

Mona Hedayati is an assistant professor in Humanities and Critical Approaches to AI with the Communication Program. She is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar whose work draws on science and technology studies, critical data studies, and insurgent posthumanism. She holds a Visual Arts MFA in Digital Media, an MRes in Social-Political Art and Design and dual PhDs in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Concordia University, Montréal), and Artistic Research (University of Antwerp). The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has supported her MFA, PhD, and recent postdoctoral research at Cambridge Digital Humanities, University of Cambridge. As an artist, Hedayati's work spans performative live events at the intersection of art and technology, drawing on small-scale machine learning models trained on data collected as part of artistic research. She has presented widely at international conferences and artistic venues, sharing work that combines theoretical inquiry with practice-based research to investigate the socio-cultural, political, and material dimensions of contemporary technologies.

Photo credit: Lloyd Mann at the University of Cambridge

Research

• Critical approaches to technology including critical technical practice, critical making, and postcolonial computing.
• Critical Data Studies and its practice-based orientations including data storytelling.
• Critical design paradigms including speculative, adversarial, forensic, and interrogative design.
• Critical Media Studies and its practice-based orientations including tactical media and technical embodiment.
• Histories of AI, infrastructural AI and its implications, ethical and responsible AI.
• Posthumanist paradigms that critically think about human-machine relations, socio-technical assemblages, and cyborgian imaginaries.

Publications

• Hedayati, Mona. (2026). “Sensory Performative Narratives: Sensing, Effecting, Ingesting.” In P. R. Kruse, N. Benterbusch (Eds.), Sensing Stories: Approaches on Multisensory Narration, Narratologia Series, De Gruyter. In press.
• Hedayati, Mona. (2025). “At the Threshold of Algorithmic Logic: Towards a Critical Aesthetics.” Technoetic Arts, Intellect Books.
• Hedayati, Mona. (2025). “Art, Science, and Technology Studies as Method.” Special issue of S+T+ARTS Symposium, ArtNodes, Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain.
• Hedayati, Mona. (2025). “From Signal to Sensation: A Critical Practice of Affective Mediation.” Proceedings of the Expanded Conference of Ars Electronica Festival, Association for Computing Machinery.
• Hedayati, Mona. (2025). “Affective Frequencies: From Body to Data-Made-Sound.” Data in Motion for a More than Human World (special issue), Somatechnics Journal of Bodies-Technologies-Power, Edinburgh University Press.
• Hedayati, Mona. (2024). “Human-Machine Relations Composed, Decomposed, Recomposed.” Journal of Posthuman Studies: Philosophy, Technology, Media, Penn State University Press.

Artistic presence

• (2026) ACM Creativity & Cognition Conference, Creativity for Change, University of the Arts London, UK.
• (2026) Irrationality & the Age of AI: Language, Ethics, & the Future of Human Expression, University of Bonn, Germany.
• (2026) Vanishing Acts: AI, Performative Knowledge, Sustainable Memory Conference, University of Malta.
• (2026) Kornhausforum Museum, as part of Staging Sensing Machines program, Bern, Switzerland.
• (2025) Hack the Promise Festival for Digitality, Art, & Society, Basel, Switzerland.
• (2025) Chaos Feminist Convention (organized by Haecksen), Kulturhaus Eidelstedt, Hamburg, Germany.

Talks

• (2026) Society for Social Studies of Science Conference, Toronto, Canada.
• (2026) Digital Humanities Today: Critical Inquiry with and about the digital, King’s College London, UK.
• (2026) Do Humans Also Dream of Electric Sheep? Technoscientific, Cultural, and Cognitive Challenges of AI, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy.
• (2025) Augmenting Human Creativity with AI Seminar, Schloss Dagstuhl, Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Germany.
• (2025) Swiss Association for the Studies of Science, Technology and Society Conference, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
• (2025) The 11th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology and the 24th International Image Festival, Bogotá, Colombia