Hènna Zàmùṛd Butt is a scholar-artist and Assistant Professor of Communication & Culture at Columbia College Chicago whose work considers how meaning and knowledge are produced and how they circulate. Her mixed-media practice spans ceramics, sound, printmaking, artist books and digital networking.

Henna’s ongoing project Bodies of Knowledge uses cyanotype, sound and ceramics to consider the ethnographer’s body as a site of knowledge-making. Artworks from the project were shown as part of Inquiries, a group show hosted at the Commons Gallery at the University of Oregon (April 2026), and at the EVOLUTION Arts Festival in Chicago (May 2026). In November 2026, a Bodies of Knowledge installation will be featured at the Bridgeport Art Center as part of Reflections, Distortions, Subversions, an exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the International Visual Sociology Association.

In 2025, Henna developed Mehfil, an art gallery housed on a tiny portable computer server, built to circulate between Wi-Fi networks in public venues and currently housed in downtown Chicago. Mehfil explores localism, limited access and the online/offline nexus in the dissemination of art. More broadly, it considers digital networking systems as sites for political expression and poetics, which Henna examines through the lens of craft in her upcoming writing. This builds on her research on “internet futuring” and community networking as opportunities for liberatory politics. With Marianne Franklin, she is co-editor of Internet Decolonized (OUP, September 2026), a collection of writing by activists and academics asking whether and how the internet can be decolonized.

As PROFESSOR H3X, Henna DJs from UK diasporic sound culture, with a sensibility forged through existential rave, jungle breaks and 2-step, and an ear for electronic and bass lineages from around the world. Her zine series Mixed Notes is offered alongside her mixes featured online as a tactile invitation into her personal listening practice and its tangents, and as a rejection of algorithmic mediation.

Henna has designed and taught undergraduate and postgraduate modules at Goldsmiths College, the University of London, King’s College London, the University of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. Her teaching experience has included classes on digital cultural studies, internet governance, media production, communication theory and media literacy.

Her educational background includes an MSc in Global Politics from Royal Holloway, University of London; an MSc in Politics and Communication from the London School of Economics and Political Science; and a PhD in Media & Communication from Goldsmiths College, University of London. From 2024 to 2026, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute and Crown School of Social Work & Public Policy.

Learn about this site.