herstory (short)...

Joana Chicau is a designer, researcher and coder, with a background in choreography and performance. She is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the Creative Institute at the University of the Arts London.

...herstory (longform)...

She researches the intersection of the body with the designed and programmed environment widening the ways in which computation is presented and made accessible to the public.

She collaborates with various international practitioners in the creative industries, non-profit and activism, on both commissioned and self-initiated projects. She also provides consultancy on research and project development.

Her projects are delivered across media: from online platforms to printed books, workshops to performative events and beyond.

She privileges the use of Free-Libre Open Source software.

She participates, curates and co-organizes events involving multi-location collaborative coding, community roundtables on digital equity and activism. Including Mesh Festival (Basel), Fiber Festival (Amsterdam), Piksel (Bergen), Transmediale Vorspiel (Berlin), Art Meets Radical Openness (Linz), Radical Networks (NYC), Seoul Mediacity Biennale, to name a few.

She is an associate lecturer at the University of Arts of London (UAL) and has also been tutoring and facilitating workshops in international various institutions. Including Central St Martins, Sandberg Institute, Pratt Institute, NYU, among others.

Chicau is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Prof. Rebecca Fiebrink and Dr. Sarah Fdili Alaoui at the Creative Computing Institute (UAL). Her research has been published at venues such as ISEA and ACM (CHI, DIS, TEI, C&C).

She actively contributes to projects at The Movement Research Unit (MRU) . She is a former member of Varia.Zone, center for everyday technology and co-founder of Netherlands Coding Live.