Hènna Zàmùṛd Butt is a scholar-artist and Assistant Professor of Communication & Culture at Columbia College Chicago. Her work considers how meaning and knowledge are produced and how they circulate. Her mixed-media practice spans ceramics, sound, printmaking, artists’ books and digital networking. Techne Studio is her practice-research studio named for the concept of knowledge through making. Here she is interested in developing mixed media work that subverts and unsettles hierarchies of hi-tech/low-tech and craft/technology.

Bodies of Knowledge uses cyanotype, sound and ceramics to foreground the contingency of ethnographic knowledge, making visible the bodily, material process of research and publication. 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 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, 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.

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 & Communications 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.

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