Ashley J Lewis

Ashley Jane Lewis is a new media artist with a focus on interactive installations, bio art, social justice, afrofuturism and speculative design. 

Her practice is tied to science and actively incorporates living organisms like slime mould and food cultures to explore ways of decentralizing humans and imagine collective, multi-species survival. She holds a BFA in New Media Art from Ryerson University in Toronto as well as a masters degree from ITP at New York University. Listed in the top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada, her award-winning work on empowered futures for marginalized groups has exhibited in both Canada and the US, most notably featured on the White House website during the Obama presidency. Ashley is an artist in residence at two New York institutions, including CultureHub NYC and NEW INC (Cultural Futures Track), run by the New Museum as well as a postdoctoral research fellow at NYU at ITP. 

Her advocacy work as an educator and activist has enabled her to push tech institutions to explore new equitable access points to technological skills and opportunities for marginalized folks. As an educator, Ashley has taught more than 3500 young people how to code. She’s proud of her work with Dan Shiffman and ml5js.org, an educational “friendly machine learning for the web” platform to create lower barriers to entry into creative computing. Ashley has taught at CultureHub NYC, Genspace, InterAccess, Ryerson University and the School for Poetic Computation among others.