Annenberg School for Communication doctoral student Roopa Vasudevan recently received both a 2020 Eyebeam Fellowship and the 2020 James D. Woods Award.

Eyebeam, a New York City-based organization supporting diverse, impact-driven artists working with technology, has launched a new initiative after being forced to close its doors by the coronavirus pandemic. Entitled “Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future,” the initiative will fund 30 projects that shine a spotlight on a digital future free of surveillance, including one by Ms.Vasudevan.

Ms. Vasudevan plans to design a practical toolkit for creative resistance through tech-based art. Concerned by the ties between new media art practice and big technology, she hopes that by developing new mechanisms for creative refusal, she and other artists can eventually break the current cycle of co-optation and dependency and use their art to bring about structural change.

Given in memory of Annenberg School graduate student James D. Woods, the Woods Award is presented to an outstanding graduate teaching assistant each year. Ms. Vasudevan was nominated for Matthew Brook O’Donnell’s undergraduate courses COMM 318: Stories from Data and COMM 313: Computational Text Analysis. Mr. O’Donnell’s courses involve teaching basic programming and data analysis to students without any coding background so that they can apply these skills to a communication-focused data science project.