“Encoded Gazes: Women of Color on Bias, Power, and Possibility in AI” will focus on women of color critiques and approaches to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Framed through the lens of women of color, this panel interrogates the inherited biases embedded in AI systems, from facial recognition and data training sets to the aesthetic tropes of generative art. Through visual works and critical reflection, the speakers explore how identity, mythology, queerness, and resistance can become tools for subverting dominant technological narratives.

Moderated by Dr. Ana Briz, Assistant Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the AD&A Museum, panelists include artist Kira Xonorika and researcher Dr. Haewon Jeong from the UCSB Center for Responsible Machine Learning. Presented by the AD&A Museum, this panel is part of Brave New Work, a 3-day symposium organized by Brandwell Arts, that will feature artist commissions, lectures, and exhibitions throughout Santa Barbara and Goleta.

Kira Xonorika (Guarani) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tovaangar (Los Angeles, California), working across generative AI, film, robotics, fashion, sculpture, performance, and literature. 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 Vera List Center, 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. Her work is part of the public collection of the Denver Art Museum. 

Haewon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jeong received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (’20), where her thesis laid key foundations for coded computing by applying information theory to design reliable large-scale computing systems. She then joined Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow (’20–’22), shifting her focus to the reliability of machine learning systems—how to build models that people can trust and depend on. She was awarded the Harvard Data Science Initiative Postdoctoral Fellowship to research how machine learning systems may make biased decisions in educational settings. Now an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara, Jeong’s research explores emerging ethical challenges of generative AI and applies AI methods to problems in physics. Her contributions have been recognized with the NSF CAREER Award, the JP Morgan Faculty Award, and a 2024 Hellman Fellowship.

Ana Briz is Assistant Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the AD&A Museum in UC Santa Barbara. The abolitionist imaginary informs her curatorial practice and research interests. Her research is situated in the field of performance, art, and visual culture in the United States, and focuses on queer, feminist, and anti-racist work by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in California. Briz holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity and an M.A. in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Art History from Florida International University.