Henna Zamurd Butt is a scholar-artist and Assistant Professor of Communication & Culture at Columbia College Chicago. Her scholarship has addressed internet access, community networking, and internet management, combining ethnographic, participatory, and coalitional methods with curatorial and creative inquiry whilst centering feminist and decolonizing theoretical approaches.

Technē Studio is the home for Henna’s research on media, craft, and sociotechnical systems. Her artistic practice spans DJing, ceramics, and printmaking, with a through line of embodied, relational, gestural, and ephemeral approaches to making. She is the co-editor of Internet Decolonized with Professor Marianne Franklin (Oxford University Press), a collection of writing by activists, scholars and practitioners, due for release in 2026.

Between late 2023 and early 2026, Henna was Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago’s Internet Equity Initiative, where she carried out a multi-sited ethnography project across the Upper Midwest of the United States. The National Science Foundation-funded research examined community-based efforts to expand broadband connectivity in urban, suburban, and rural localities. Her doctoral research was conducted at the Media, Communications & Cultural Studies department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and involved five years of engaged ethnography examining African and Asian youth and feminist activism in internet governance.

With experience in the U.S. and U.K., Henna’s teaching spans undergraduate and postgraduate courses including: History of Networked Technologies and Digital Cultural Studies at King’s College London; Connected Curriculum and Global Media Studies at Goldsmiths; and Podcasting and Media Literacy at Columbia College Chicago.

From 2013 and 2018, Henna worked as a journalist and editor at Newzulu/Citizenside and Media Diversified. Between 2016 and 2022 she was founder and Artistic Director of Bare Lit Festival, an annual celebration of creatives of colour in London, U.K. Her educational background includes: BA History & Politics, SOAS (School of Oriental & African Studies), London; MSc Global Politics, Royal Holloway, University of London; MSc Politics & Communication, LSE (London School of Economics & Political Science); PhD Media & Communication, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

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