Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design and a 2024-25 Visiting Fellow at Cambridge Visual Culture. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, was released by X Artists’ Books in December 2022 as the first in its X Topics series, edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram.
She was a 2021 visiting Mellon Professor in the Practice at Occidental College, where she co-curated the exhibition “Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI” with Meldia Yesayan at OXY ARTS. An expanded version of the exhibition was staged at the Ford Foundation Gallery in 2023 under the title “What Models Make Worlds.” She received a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.
Her multidisciplinary collaboration, Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup) was presented in 2024 at the Music Center LA, REDCAT, and the Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan. She is the guest editor of the spring 2023 special issue of ART PAPERS on artificial intelligence, co-edited with Sarah Higgins. Her current book project considers ancestral intelligences and diasporic technologies of worldmaking.
She serves as a Contributing Editor for ART PAPERS, an Advisory Board Member for the International Armenian Literary Alliance and Azad Archives, and was a Contributing Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books from 2020-21.
Her writing and commentary have appeared in AI & Society, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail Performance Research Journal, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, ART PAPERS, Hyperallergic, Georgia Journal, Archetypes with Meghan Markle, and AI Now Institute’s “New AI Lexicon” series.
With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she makes up one-third of Research Service, a media collective that pursues performative and practice-based forms of scholarship.
Her individual and collaborative performances have been presented at the Centre Pompidou, New Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Judson Memorial Church, and Drawing Center.
Her work has received coverage in Los Angeles Times, Brooklyn Rail, Mousse, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Armenian Public Radio. She has presented invited talks for the University of Chicago, MIT, Pacific Northwest College of Art, the UCLA Art|Sci Lab, SAIC, Cooper Union, and elsewhere.