Principal Investigators

Elaine Ayers

Elaine is an Assistant Professor at Gallatin at NYU, where she works on botanical collecting, preservation, and display in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Princeton University, and currently has three books about colonial nature under contract with academic and trade presses. Moss: A Cultural History (Knopf) presents the simultaneous ubiquity and exceptionalism of bryophytes in colonial history for public-facing audiences. Her work has been supported by institutions like the New York Botanical Garden, the Huntington Library & Botanic Gardens, and the Yale Center for British Art.

Tega Brain

Tega is an Assistant Professor in the Integrated Design and Media Program at NYU Tandon. She is an artist, environmental engineer, and researcher whose work examines emerging computational technologies, experimental online systems, ecology, and environmental infrastructures. She has exhibited widely, most recently in the Vienna Biennale for Change, the Guangzhou Triennial, and her work has been supported by fellowships at Data & Society, Eyebeam, and the Australia Council for the Arts, among others. Her first book, Code as Creative Media, was co authored with Golan Levin and published in 2021 by MIT Press.

Ahmed Ansari

Ahmed is an Assistant Professor in the Integrated Design and Media Program at NYU Tandon. He holds a Ph.D. in Design Studies with a focus on postcolonial and decolonial theory, histories of technology and design in the Global South (specifically, South Asia), and the politics of culture and race in technology development and design practice. He was a founding member of the Decolonising Design platform and was part of the team that designed the IXDA award winning digital citizen science platform, macroinvertebrates.org. He is currently working on a manuscript on design, speculation, and non-Anglo-European knowledges.