I am open to…
> Research projects, guest lectures, and interviews in my areas of interest: tech governance, music tech, creative research methods, feminist and decolonizing politics, critical approaches to sociotechnical systems
> DJing and event collaborations
> Exhibitions, art shows, residencies, & markets, in addition to commissions that fit my practice.

A longer version of my bio

Dr Henna Zamurd Butt is a scholar-artist and Assistant Professor of Communication & Culture at Columbia College Chicago. She is interested in technology, craft, and power, working across ethnography, sound, and ceramics. Her research-creation initiative, Technē Studio, develops feminist and decolonizing approaches to craft and technology.

Her work examines internet governance, community networking, and knowledge politics through ethnographic and creative methods. With Marianne Franklin (University of Groningen), she is co-editor of Internet Decolonized (Oxford University Press, 2026), which brings together academic and activist perspectives to ask whether the internet can be decolonized. Her contribution introduces a dialectic of “management” and “futuring” to analyze colonial dynamics in global internet governance. She has also conducted ethnographic research with the University of Chicago’s Internet Equity Initiative on internet expansion across the U.S. Midwest.

Henna’s practice engages digital networking, sound, ceramics, and print as forms of material and relational inquiry. In 2025, she launched Mehfil, a traveling server-as-gallery in Chicago that explores how limited by design networked technologies might reanimate local geographies and community relations. Her ongoing project, Bodies of Knowledge, uses cyanotype, sound, and ceramics to consider the ethnographer’s body as a site of knowledge-making.

Before academia she worked as a journalist and editor, and founded Bare Lit Festival (2016–2022) in London. She holds a master’s in Global Politics from Royal Holloway, a master’s in Politics & Communication from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from the Department of Media, Communications, & Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. From 2024 to 2026 she was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute and Crown School of Social Work & Public Policy.