About:
Sana Akram is a Pakistani XR creator, media artist and an urbanist based in Toronto, Canada. As a Fulbright alum, she graduated with a MS in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons School of Design, The New School, where she diversified her research-practice by implementing an interdisciplinary design approach. Her award-winning interactive documentary, Little Pakistan – Future Histories, has showcased at several international festivals and her research has been published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. For her, this marked the beginning of a progressive professional exploration of new media for civic engagement.
Currently, she is pursuing a Doctorate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University as a recipient of the prestigious Elia Scholars Program Award with a research-creation focus on realizing the transformative, generative, and creative potential of the historical Urdu language storytelling tradition and performative art of Tilismi Dastan with emergent media technologies and XR. In conjunction, her evolving artistic practice and iterative XR works probe how the themes of wonder, relationality, and enchantment manifest and are enacted in storytelling, performance, and worlding traditions. Her broader research interests include immersive storytelling and performance, interactive documentary, oral tradition, worldbuilding, emergent media, and cocreation.