Portrait of Kenia Hale

Kenia Hale (she/her)

Contact

kh3295@columbia.edu

About

Kenia Hale is a writer and scholar, and Administrative Coordinator at Incite. Kenia graduated with distinction from Yale University in 2021 with a BA in Computing and the Art (Architecture Concentration), where she won numerous awards including the prestigious Don Nakanishi Prize for high standards of academic achievement and promoting race/ethnic relations at Yale.

Prior to joining Incite, she completed a two year Emerging Scholar fellowship at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy and the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, where she produced scholarship at the intersection of tech, environmental justice, and racial justice. At Princeton, Kenia led a research project about Liberatory Technology, planned and moderated events on Imagining Radical Tech Futures and Critical Technology Ecologies, and planned the first international Just Futures Hub Conference. Kenia has presented her research at numerous conferences including 4S in Cholula, Mexico, Data 4 Public Good, and the United Nations “Artificial Intelligence to support Collective Intelligence for Sustainable Development” conference with the United Nations Development Program Accelerator Labs Network in Doha, Qatar.

She has also served as an Environmental Justice in Tech fellow at Earth Hacks, co-head teacher at The Octavia Project, and is a founding editor of a Black Queer publishing press. Kenia also maintains her own creative practices, including writing award-winning speculative fiction, coding video games, and producing an award winning episode of Inherited Podcast, using oral history to trace Black environmental legacies across Ohio and her family's relationships with climate change. Kenia is passionate about creating accessible public knowledge and honoring and preserving the myriad ways of knowing that sustain her community and others.