Roopa Vasudevan

Roopa Vasudevan is a South Asian-American new media artist, computer programmer and researcher. Her work examines sociotechnical defaults; interrogates rules, conventions, and protocols that we often ignore or take for granted; and centers humanity and community in explorations of technology’s impacts on society. Bridging Web technologies with tactile and sensory forms, she uses digital systems and tools that are prevalent in everyday life in poetic, unexpected, or reflective ways, surfacing social or political tensions in our taken-for-granted practices and questioning the breakneck speed of technological innovation. Through a varied creative toolkit that includes data collection practices, systems design, web development, and remix—alongside analog forms such as drawing, printmaking, and zine publication—she seeks to emphasize personal and human experiences, often on an individual or local level, in a time of Big Data, automation, and surveillance capitalism.

Vasudevan has exhibited her work internationally, and been featured by the New York Times, WHYY, Reuters, Slate, Hyperallergic, Jezebel, PBS NewsHour, Public Radio International, and more. She has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to artist-led initiatives, and her work has been exhibited and supported by such spaces as Flux Factory (Queens); SOHO20 Gallery (Brooklyn); SPACES (Cleveland); ABC No Rio (New York); AUTOMAT (Philadelphia); Public Works Administration (New York); Unrequited Leisure (Nashville); Space 1026 (Philadelphia); Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia); Dunkunsthalle (New York); and Vox Populi (Philadelphia), where she was a member of the artist collective between 2019 and 2023. 

She is a 2020 Eyebeam Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow; a 2024 Processing Foundation Fellow; a current community member at NEW INC, the art and technology incubator at the New Museum (New York, NY), where she was a member of the Art & Code track (in partnership with Rhizome) between 2021 and 2023 and a recipient of the Next Web Seed Grant in 2022; and between 2022 and 2025 was a co-investigator on the Data Fluencies Project, an international research initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation, through which she organized three exhibitions in 2025 on the poetics and possibilities of data. Her writing has appeared in venues such as the Brooklyn Rail, New Media and Society, Media-N: The Journal of the New Media Caucus, the Social Science Research Council’s “Just Tech” platform, and ACM Interactions, along with a range of self-published and bespoke collections. Her current book project, under contract with MIT Press, explores the complex and involved relationships between new media artists and the tech industry. 

In 2023, Vasudevan earned her PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She received an MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2013, and was selected as an ITP Resident Research Fellow in academic year 2013-14. Between 2016 and 2018, she was an Assistant Arts Professor of Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai.