Driving innovation through Afrocentric knowledge

Ashley Jane Lewis is a new media artist and creative technologist with a focus on interactive installations, bio art, social justice and speculative design. She holds a BFA in new media art from Toronto Metropolitan, as well as a master’s degree from ITP at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Her artistic practice explores Black cultures of the past, present and future through computational and analog mediums including coding and machine learning, digital and physical fabrication, data weaving, microorganisms and live performance. Her practice is tied to science and actively incorporates living organisms like slime mold, mycelium and other organic cultures to explore ways of decentralizing humans and imagine collective, multi-species survival. Listed in the top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada, her award-winning work on empowered futures for marginalized groups has exhibited in both Canada and the U.S., most notably featured on the White House website during the Obama presidency.

Her advocacy work as an educator and activist has enabled her to push tech institutions to explore new equitable policies that better consider the safety of women, Black people and Queer identities. As an educator, Ashley has taught more than 3,500 young people how to code, earning her press coverage as a tech activist from Reader’s Digest, Huffington Post, Metro News and Washington Square News. Ashley has taught at CultureHub NYC, Genspace, InterAccess, Toronto Metropolitan University, OCAD University, Parsons and the School for Poetic Computation, to name a few. Ashley was most recently featured in a Google series (external link)  for their Black Women Techmakers campaign. With well over a million views, this Webby Award-winning series aims to show the diversity of creative, socially driven practices in technology.


Photo: Brandon Lewis