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The Vera List Center Forum 2025 introduces the Matter of Intelligence VLC Fellows—Moriah Evans, Mashinka Hakopian, Joyce Joumaa, and Kira Xonorika—offering a first public glimpse into their unfolding fellowship projects. Across four lively conversations, the VLC Fellows are joined by artists, scholars, and curators to explore intelligence in all its forms—how it is measured, experienced in the body, cultivated within communities, and shared across people, species, and technologies—while rethinking what it means to know, sense, and imagine in a world shaped by history, culture, and technology.
12 pm | Calibrated Intelligence: Joyce Joumaa and Meredith Broussard
2025–2027 VLC Fellow Joyce Joumaa and data journalist Meredith Broussard explore the historical and ongoing entanglements of intelligence testing, racial classification, and technological control. Taking Joumaa’s fellowship research into early IQ testing at Ellis Island as a point of departure, their dialogue traces how intelligence has been “calibrated” through systems built to sort, exclude, and hierarchize human life. From early 20th-century eugenics to contemporary algorithmic bias, they interrogate the myth of technological neutrality and examine how what Broussard has termed “technochauvinist” systems continue to reinforce structural inequality—and how such systems might be challenged or reimagined through artistic, documentary, and critical practices.
1 pm | Lunch
2 pm | Embodied Intelligences: Moriah Evans and André Lepecki
2025–2027 VLC Fellow Moriah Evans is joined by writer, curator, and dramaturg André Lepecki in an exploration of the body as both a social and intelligent agent. Together, they delve into the ways in which knowledge embedded in our bodies enriches our understanding of one another. Acknowledging that intelligence is informed by biomechanical processes alongside social and political contexts, they reflect on how this embodied intelligence influences what we can sense, how we perceive, and what we envision as possible. Evans’s choreographic practice and Lepecki’s scholarship on choreopolitics provide the framework for a conversation that unpacks the complex interplay of biomechanical, social, and political forces that shape perception and belief, movement, and action.
3 pm | Liberatory Intelligence: Mashinka Hakopian and Catherine D'Ignazio
2025–2027 VLC Fellow Mashinka Hakopian and scholar-artist Catherine D’Ignazio gather around the idea of liberatory intelligence: ways of knowing born from ancestry, shaped in community, and sustained through care. They consider how such forms of intelligence resist the erasure of non-Western epistemologies and push back against the forces of digital colonialism and technocapitalism. Building on their work in ancestral intelligence and feminist data science, they highlight practices of cultural preservation, community-built datasets, and grassroots knowledge-making that challenge algorithmic control and imagine more just futures.
4 pm Entangled Intelligences: Kira Xonorika and Tiara Roxanne
2025–2027 VLC Fellow Kira Xonorika and scholar-artist Dr. Tiara Roxanne explore entangled notions of intelligence, centering Indigenous epistemologies, ancestral knowledge systems, sociotechnical hauntologies, and speculative worldbuilding. Drawing from their respective practices in cyberfeminist critique, performance, generative art, and Two-Spirit futurity, they consider how intelligence might be understood not as a metric of mastery, but as a relational force—emergent across species, technologies, and cosmologies.
This event is part of the Vera List Center Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence.
Presented by Vera List Center for Art and Politics at Schools of Public Engagement.
This program will feature ASL interpretation. Wheelchair or mobility device seating is available. Please let us know if you need any accommodation when registering or by emailing vlc@newschool.edu.
Starr Foundation Hall is on the lower level of 63 Fifth Avenue and is accessible by elevator. There are accessible restrooms on that floor and an all gender restroom available on the 1st/3rd floors.
The nearest accessible subway stations are the 14 St-Union Sq L, N, Q, R, W and the 14 St/6 Av F, M, uptown only; and the 6th Ave L is fully accessible.
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Mashinka Hakopian, PhD, is a 2025–2027 VLC Fellow. Born in Yerevan, Armenia, she is an artist, researcher, and Associate Professor at ArtCenter College of Design.
Her research attends to ancestral intelligences: feminist interventions in computational media rooted in ancestral, non-Western knowledge systems.
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Moriah Evans is a 2025–2027 VLC Fellow. She is a New York-based artist working in and on the form of dance as an artifact, object, and culture with its histories, protocols, default production mechanisms, modes of staging, and viewing. Evans approaches choreography as an ideological pursuit capable of probing the intersections of embodiment, performance, and politics. Recent works include: Remains Persist, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2023) and Performance Space New York (2022); REPOSE, Beach Sessions, New York (2021); Be My Muse, Pace Live, New York (2021); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2018); Configure, The Kitchen, New York (2018). In 2011, Evans initiated The Bureau for the Future of Choreography—a collective investigating participatory performances. Evans was Editorial Director, Editor-in-Chief, and Managing Editor of Movement Research Performance Journal (2010–22), and Dance & Process Co-Curator, The Kitchen (2016–23). She was a Hodder Fellow (2023–24), Guggenheim Fellow (2022), and FCA Individual Artist Awardee (2017).
Mashinka Hakopian, PhD, is a 2025–2027 VLC Fellow. Born in Yerevan, Armenia, she is an artist, researcher, and Associate Professor at ArtCenter College of Design. She is a 2024–25 Visiting Research Fellow at Cambridge University and a 2024 Eyebeam Fellow. She is the author of The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books 2022), an artist book and work of speculative feminist media theory that presents lectures on data justice delivered by “artificial killjoys.” Her recent multidisciplinary collaborative artwork, Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup), explores community dataset creation and has been presented at REDCAT, Music Center LA, and the Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan. With Meldia Yesayan, she is the co-curator of What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI at Ford Foundation Gallery (2023) and Encoding Futures at OXY ARTS (2021). Her research attends to ancestral intelligences: feminist interventions in computational media rooted in ancestral, non-Western knowledge systems.
Joyce Joumaa is a 2025–2027 VLC Boris Lurie Fellow. She is a video artist and writer working between Beirut, Montreal, and Amsterdam. After growing up in Lebanon, she pursued a BFA in Film Studies at Concordia University in Canada. Her work explores microhistories in Lebanon and elsewhere to understand how past structures shape contemporary realities. Central to her practice is an interest in the political charge inscribed in space and the social psychology that unfolds from the tensions emerging between the two.
Joumaa’s work has been presented at institutions including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, e-flux Screening Room, Galerie Stewart Hall, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the 60th Venice Biennale, and the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Plein Sud Centre d’exposition, and Eli Kerr Gallery. Joumaa is the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists and the 2023 Plein Sud Award.
Kira Xonorika is a 2025–2027 VLC Fellow. She is an interdisciplinary artist and author based in Tovaangar (Los Angeles, California) working across generative AI, film, robotics, fashion, sculpture, performance, and text. Xonorika’s work explores the connections between technoscience, interspecies and planetary intelligence, worldbuilding, Indigenous sovereignty, and ecology. She has received awards, residencies, and fellowships from the Akademie der Künste, Dreaming Beyond AI, Momus and Eyebeam, Hyundai Artlab, and Ars Electronica. Her work has been widely exhibited across the Americas, Asia, and Europe, at institutions such as the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, Honor Fraser Gallery, MASS MoCA, arebyte London, and the Mercosur Biennial. Publishing credits include e-flux, Momus, C Magazine, and Hyundai Artlab. In 2024, she spearheaded Future Memory Lab, South America’s first GenAI art residency, with support from the Swiss Arts Council.
André Lepecki is an essayist, dramaturge, and independent curator based in New York City. He is Full Professor, Department of Performance Studies, and Associate Dean at the Center for Research & Study, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He has authored Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement (2006) and Singularities: dance in the age of performance (2016). He has curated festivals and projects for HKW-Berlin, MoMA-Warsaw, MoMA PS1, the Hayward Gallery, Haus der Künst-Munich, Sydney Biennial 2016, among others. He received the “Best Performance Award 2008” from AICA-USA for co-curating and directing the redoing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Haus der Kunst 2006, Performa 2007). In the 1980s and 90s, he was dramaturge for choreographers Vera Mantero, Francisco Camacho, João Fiadeiro, and Meg Stuart. Since 2008, he has collaborated in several of Brazilian artist Eleonora Fabião’s actions. In 2024, he curated the online exhibition Soiled–Paul McCarthy’s early performance works (1971–76) for Xavier Hufkens gallery.
Catherine D’Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning and Director of the Data + Feminism Lab at MIT. She is the co-author of Data Feminism (MIT Press 2020) and author of Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press 2024), both award-winning books that describe more liberatory and empowering approaches to data science, AI, and visualization. She teaches Geographic Information Systems, data visualization, and civic tech design in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.
Meredith Broussard is an Associate Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and the research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of the 2023 book More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, as well as the award-winning 2018 book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (both MIT Press). Her research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting, with particular interests in AI ethics and using data analysis for social good. She appears in the Emmy-nominated documentary Coded Bias, now streaming on Netflix. Her features and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and other outlets.
Tiara Roxanne is a Purhépecha (descendant) Mestizaje scholar and artist. Dr. Roxanne’s work is dedicated to rethinking the ethics of AI through an anticolonial cyberfeminist lens. They are currently working toward their book project with University of California Press, forthcoming 2026. As a performance artist and practitioner, they work between the digital and the material using textile, from the space of the body as a site of refusal and ceremony. Roxanne has presented at Images Festival in Toronto, Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center in New York, Trinity Square Video in Toronto, European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and SOAS in London, among others.
