Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Associate Director of Research for the Future of Democracy program at the Berggruen Institute. Prior to joining the Institute, Mashinka held a teaching appointment in UCLA’s Department of English, teaching courses in media studies and visual culture, and was a Senior Researcher in AI ethics at Swell Creative Group. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania, with a Graduate Certificate in Cinema and Media Studies, and an MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University. With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she is a co-founder of Research Service, a media collective that develops performative and practice-based models of scholarship. She is the co-editor of Present Tense Pamphlets, a hybrid digital and print publishing platform for score-based performance, released through Northwestern University and the Block Museum of Art. Her book on algorithmic bias is forthcoming in 2021 from X Artists’ Books.