Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, scholar, organizer, and coder based across the Pacific. Currently, they are a Mancosh Pathways to the Professoriate Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. Their research and creative practice critically examines the entanglements between technology, racial capitalism, modes of care, and environmental justice, taking form through speculative fiction, prose, sculpture, and textiles. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside, which examines the social and environmental impacts of technology on agriculture and rural communities. The book was awarded the 2023 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award and was included on the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice list.
Recent policy writing includes “Bodily Harms: Mapping the Risks of the Emerging Biometric Tech,” co-authored with Shazeda Ahmed, which examines how AI-driven biometric systems classify, categorize, and control bodies in ways that curtail human rights.
In 2024 they received an Eyebeam Democracy Machine Artist Fellowship to support their work on soft, embroidered textile hard drives for An Archive of Witch Fever. They have shown work and given talks at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Palazzo San Giuseppe Polignano a Mare, Taipei Design City Exhibition, Beijing Design Week, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, IxDA Switzerland, and more.
Through their work as a steward of Collective Action School (formerly Logic School) and as an advisor at Processing Foundation, they channel their love of building learning communities around imagining more joyful, relational technologies.
In previous lives they were: Faculty at ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering for the Master in Design for Responsible AI, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the UCLA Center on Race and Digital Justice / UCLA Gender Studies, recognized for their work in tech and justice as a Luminary for Omidyar’s The Tech We Want program, spent 7 years as the Creative Director at Logic Magazine, a platform engineer at Mapbox, and a designer and engineer at Meedan, a global tech non-profit building open source fact-checking and NLP tools for journalists and activists.