Cathy Thomas is a writer, filmmaker, and creative critical scholar whose work on the ‘Black Fantastic’ and decolonial feminist thought across various genres and modes of image and text. Currently, she is discovering modes of play and resistance 3 novels, 2 comic books, 1 trade book collaboration, 1 scholarly monograph, and 1 experimental textile+digital+sound art installation for a 2028 museum exhibition, all in various states of completion, delay, ecstasy, and exhaustion.

Dr. Cathy Thomas

Calais is a fourth year undergraduate student at UC Santa Barbara studying Statistics and Data Science and minoring in Computational Linguistics. She is part of Women in Computer Science, the Daily Nexus Data team, and works as an undergraduate learning assistant for intro data science courses. She is interested in the interaction of machines and natural language.

Calais Waring

Cass is a graduate student in the UCSB Department of Film and Media Studies where they research social media, masculinity, gaming cultures, and AI through interdisciplinary methods. They’re also a passionate educator of Media Studies, data science, web design, and programming. Recently, they co-authored a paper on data feminism and bias in AI training datasets.

Cass Mayeda

Sierra is a UX/UI designer passionate about creating intuitive, user-focused digital experiences. With a background in eCommerce design, content strategy, and front-end interfaces, she brings expertise in crafting clean, interactive solutions that enhance usability and engagement. She is also the founder of Sierra Design Co. and Athletic Aesthetic, blending creativity with strategic design.

Sierra Peltcher

Josh Bevan is a technical art and VFX contractor. He creates real-time and offline FX for film and games, and works with startups as a technical artist on volumetric video and machine learning projects. He has had contracts as a machine learning consultant, a pipeline TD, a full stack engineer, a VFX artist, an AR UX designer, a researcher, and as a writer of science fiction.

Josh Bevan

Anna Shahverdyan is a political science graduate from UC Santa Barbara and the Digital-Born Data Lead at Contrapuntal. She is passionate about the intersection of law and AI, with a focus on ethical innovation and advocacy. Currently, she contributes to the Women in Carnival project through research and digital storytelling, managing content and outreach on Instagram. Anna is excited to be part of Contrapuntal’s mission to center human perspectives in AI and challenge traditional knowledge systems.

Anna Shahverdyan

Calista is an upcoming senior at UCSB who is majoring in English and minoring in applied psychology. Her focus in the Contrapuntal AI Research project is on the reading and analysis of Sylvia Wynter’s Jonkonnu, John Canoe. Calista’s interests consist of human rights, social justice, and the intersectionality of identity. She is committed to exploring these topics in literature and the collective human experience, as well as how the developing role of AI works in representing this scholarship.

Calista Dollaga

Jiyoo Kim-Jung is a high school student at Dos Pueblos High School who writes poetry, short stories in order to explore her inner thoughts. She has been writing stories for around nine years and has been writing poetry for a little over one. In her free time, she can be found playing the piano and drafting poems about playing the piano.

Jiyoo Kim-Jung

Jessie is an undergraduate student at UCSB majoring in Statistics & Data Science and Psychological & Brain Sciences. Her interdisciplinary fields of study drive her to explore how data can be used not only to measure behavior, but also to deepen our understanding of human experience. Through the Contrapuntal AI Research project, she is committed to examining the complexities of AI development, particularly on how to integrate a more humanist perspective, through her involvement in data coding and close readings of Sylvia Wynter’s work.

Jessie Ding

Corinna Kelley is an incoming sophomore at UC Santa Barbara, currently majoring in English and planning to pursue a double major in Film and Media Studies. She is participating in the NHI reading and analysis segment of the Contrapuntal AI project. While her interests remain broad, her emerging focus lies in exploring how artificial intelligence can be leveraged either to drive social progress and dismantle systemic division or, conversely, how it might be used to reinforce and deepen those schisms.

Corinna Kelley

Henry Patrick Coburn is a writer and scholar currently studying and teaching in English Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With degrees from Cambridge University and the University of London, Henry has had pieces published in such publications as the Independent Publisher’s Magazine and The Erotic Review. His current research in the Digital Humanities involves applying LLM parsers to the concepts of doubt and uncertainty in generative A.I., while his casual writing includes reviews, fiction and commentary on the fiction industry in all its products and permutations.

Henry Patrick Coburn

Elisa Coccioli is an undergraduate student at UCSB, studying Ecology and Sociology. They are participating in the Women in Carnival data collection for the Contra-puntal AI project. Her interests range across environmental studies, eco-feminism, and decolonial queer theory as frameworks for understanding structural inequality. Their current focus includes exploring how to use artificial intelligence to support human-centered research and its impacts on the environment.

Elisa Coccioli

Kamaya Jackson uses she her pronouns a Black woman from Oakland, California, majoring in Black Studies.She serves as the 2025–2026 Co Chair of the Black Student Union and Co-Chair of the A.S. Unity Commission. Kamaya is passionate about racial equity, student empowerment, and creating inclusive spaces for marginalized communities. Her leadership is grounded in purpose, advocacy, and a deep commitment to justice.

Kamaya Jackson

Ripley Baker is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research includes the environmental humanities, anti-colonial climate justice, feminist science and technology studies, the biotechnical turn in our understanding 'the human,' and utopian worldbuilding. His current project focuses on sf worldbuilding via the lens of critical hope, and the potentially radical forms of resistance enacted by racialized, queer, neurodivergent, and working-class subjects who, ensconced in a world characterized by crisis and (ostensibly intractable) binary oppositions, choose to do things otherwise

Ripley Baker

Sofia Mosqueda is a recent graduate with a B.A. in Writing and Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara; she also holds a minor in Professional Writing with a concentration in editing. In addition to being published in several literary magazines, she received the Brancart Fiction Award for her short story I Was There When You’d Cry, which explores themes of generational misogyny and womanhood in a fragmented form. Currently, she’s a technical writer for ShipHawk, a shipping software company, and she intends to continue writing creatively in her free time.

Sofia Mosqueda

Saide Kamille Singh (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her doctoral research seeks to understand the convergence that occurs when we consider the criticality of diachronic Caribbean food histories alongside the culinary agencies offered by the African and Indian descendent Caribbean women who have grown, cooked, prepared, and narrativized food. In her efforts to support the Caribbean intellectual community at UCSB, she also devotes her time to being the Research Assistant for the Caribbean Studies Research Focus Group and the Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative.

Saide Kamille Singh

Winston Zuo is a fourth-year computer science student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Currently, he is working on developing the database technologies necessary to power Contrapuntal. He is passionate about the intersectional applications of computer science in the social sciences and other disciplines.

Winston Zuo

Laila Shereen Sakr is a media artist and Associate Professor at UC Santa Barbara. Her art exhibitions like Capital Glitch (Qualcomm Institute, 2021) and publications like the book Arabic Glitch (Stanford University Press, 2023) explore algorithmic systems and critical AI, using glitches aesthetically and as a metaphor to reveal global disruptions and interconnections. As VJ Um Amel (moniker or video jockey “Mother of Hope”), she combines artistic innovation with critical inquiry, using data like clay to transform how we understand our contemporary worlds and future possibilities.

Dr. Laila Shereen Sakr

Lexxus Edison is a PhD Candidate at UC Santa Barbara in the English PhD program pursuing an emphasis in Black Studies. Lexxus’s research areas include African American Literature and Culture, Black Performance Studies, and Creative Writing. Her research examines 20th-21st century African American autobiographies exploring black debt; she examines grief and loss within the black autobiography as a form of debt. She is very committed to her community and the work she engages in; she has served as a graduate intern for Office of Black Student Development (OBSD), TA for Black Studies and English, a co-chair for the Committee of Graduate Students (CoGS) in the English Department, The Catalyst Research Assistant, and a Research Assistant for Hemispheric South(s).

Lexxus Edison

Shashank S is a MS/PhD student at the Department of Media, Arts and Technology. Shashank is working on experimental-creative data visualization techniques for contrapuntal to narrate stories from the world of Media and Social studies. He is into Movies, and sports such Fencing, Cricket and F1. 

About

Meet Our Team

Principal Investigators