ABOUT
Ahnjili ZhuParris, PhD (NL/USA), is an AI engineer, media researcher, and computational artist. Ahnjili's doctoral research in medicine used machine learning to predict diagnoses and prognoses from smartphone and wearable data. As an AI engineer, she specializes in computer vision and visual retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Her media research examines internet discourses around specific topics, tracing how narratives form and circulate online. Her current computational art comprises research-based moving-image and installation works exploring how bodies are measured, optimized, and represented by AI systems.
Ahnjili holds a PhD in Medicine from Leiden University, a Master's in Cognitive Neuroscience from Radboud University, and a Bachelor's in Neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh. She is a Mozilla Creative Media Award recipient, Processing Foundation Fellow, and Public AI Creative Fellow. Her work has been supported by the Mozilla Foundation (US), IMPAKT (NL), and Constant (BE), and exhibited at Ars Electronica (AT), Articulating Data (UK), and the CICA Museum (KR).
See the full gallery of installations and video work, recent talks and workshops, and publications and interviews.
FEATURED PROJECTS
2025 DEEPFAKE: A Video Essay
A critical video essay exploring the implications and technology behind deepfake media, examining the ethical considerations and societal impacts of synthetic media generation.
2024 Fashion Police Drones
Fashion Police Drones transforms drones into arbiters of fashion, inviting the audience to set the criteria for fashion norms through an interactive platform. This installation highlights the whimsical aspects of fashion norms while prompting serious reflection on discrimination and privacy.
2024 Screen-to-Soundscape
An experimental approach to re-imagining screen readers, developing a free and open-source explorative tool that transforms a screen into an immersive soundscape with spatial audio and rich descriptive alt-text for blind and visually impaired users.
EDUCATION
| 2020 - 2024 | PhD in Medicine Leiden University |
| 2016 - 2018 | MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience Radboud Universiteit |
| 2012 - 2016 | BSc in Biomedical Sciences (with Honours) Edinburgh University |
AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS & GRANTS
2025 Public AI
Public AI Creative Fellowship, MetaGov • USA
The Public AI Creative Fellowship is a six-month initiative by MetaGov developing cultural narratives around public AI: systems that are open, democratically governed, and accountable to the communities they affect. As the Creative Technologist fellow, I built interactive digital experiences exploring AI as public infrastructure.
2024 Digitale Cultuur
Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie • Netherlands • €7,500
Artificial Nouveau Studio ontwikkelt Deepfake: a visual essay and interactive installation, een project over de impact van deepfake-technologie en de ethische en maatschappelijke uitdagingen ervan. Gezichts- en stemgegevens van deelnemers worden geïntegreerd in een gepersonaliseerd verhaal; het project wordt in 2025 gepresenteerd op Noorderlicht (NL) en Identity 2.0 (VK).
2024 Fresh Perspective
Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie • Netherlands
Screen-to-Soundscape received the 2024 Fresh Perspective grant from the Stimuleringsfonds, which supports cross-sector collaborations offering new perspectives on current crises, from discrimination to social and opportunity inequality.
2024 Processing Foundation Fellowship
Processing Foundation • USA
Screen-to-Soundscape also received a 2024 Processing Foundation Fellowship, part of the foundation's work in developing tools of community power, connection, and stewardship.
2023 European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists
European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists • Netherlands
VOICES invites participants to record a secret and follow their voice through processing, analysis, and cloning by machine listening algorithms. In return they hear a sound-art composition in which their voice narrates the secrets of others. The grant, with support from IMPAKT, brought the installation to Ars Electronica 2023.
2021 Mozilla Creative Media Awards
Mozilla Foundation • United States
Future Wake turns predictive policing upside down: instead of predicting crime, it uses machine learning on historical data to predict who, when, and how the next victim of fatal police violence might die, and deepfake algorithms to give those predicted victims faces and stories.
EXHIBITIONS & COMMISSIONS
2026 Close Enough
GOGBOT Festival, Enschede, Netherlands
Close Enough is a performative installation about the intimacy of drone surveillance: the operator is close enough to see a target's face and learn their daily habits, but far enough away to kill without physical consequence. Autonomous drones, computer vision, and the visual language of military intelligence place the audience inside the logic of pattern-of-life analysis.
2024 New Media Art Conference
CICA Museum, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Fashion Police Drones was presented at the CICA Museum's New Media Art Conference in June 2024. Armed with custom fashion recognition algorithms, the drones track visitors against audience-defined criteria for "fashion crimes", raising questions about surveillance, automation in law enforcement, and cultural profiling.
2024 Screen-to-Soundscape/Techno Disobedience
Constant, The Processing Foundation, The Simulerings Fonds • Belgium, USA, Netherlands
Screen-to-Soundscape reimagines the screen reader as an immersive soundscape: layered voices read on-screen text in unison, with spatial audio revealing where each text sits in the browser. The free and open-source prototype offers blind and visually impaired users a more intuitive way to navigate digital content. Supported by Constant, the Processing Foundation, and the Stimuleringsfonds.
2023 VOICES
IMPAKT festival, Utrecht, Netherlands
VOICES invites participants to record a secret and follow their voice through processing, analysis, and cloning by machine listening algorithms. In return they hear a sound-art composition in which their voice narrates the secrets of others, making the opaque inner workings of machine listening audible.
2023 VOICES
Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria
VOICES invites participants to record a secret and follow their voice through processing, analysis, and cloning by machine listening algorithms. In return they hear a sound-art composition in which their voice narrates the secrets of others, making the opaque inner workings of machine listening audible.
2023 Digital Pioneers: A Visionary Prelude
Stichting Impakt • Utrecht, Netherlands
"Digital Pioneers: A Visionary Prelude" is a cheeky deepfake introduction to IMPAKT festival 2023, recasting three prominent tech CEOs as digital orators who deliver the festival's opening remarks. Their modulated voices blend into a single harmonious symphony, blurring the line between human creativity and technological prowess.
2023 Articulating Data
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Babble-on is a web-based installation allowing users to create personalized babble tapes by recording 2-3 sentences into a microphone. The audio is sliced and remixed to maintain the same audio properties of their voices. Users can download their tapes to disguise their conversations from audio surveillance. Presented at the Articulating Data conference 2023.
2021 This Machine Is Black
Identity 2.0, London, United Kingdom
This exhibition explored how Afrofuturism can be used to remove (or at least alleviate) the normative pressure that AI puts on non-normative bodies. Although with a few exceptions, the black experience has largely been invisible in AI datasets. I trained a series of generative AI algorithms on Afrofuturistic datasets to envision the future of the Afrofuturism aesthetic.
RESIDENCIES & COLLABORATIONS
2022 - 2024 Shibboleth: Creation of a Hybrid Voice
Effi & Amir • Brussels, Belgium
We produced a 'dual voice' - that transforms fluidly from a recognizable voice of Speaker A to a voice of a Speaker B while speaking. With the "switch" happening at points of sonic uncertainty in the voice output, where a certain articulation or tonal quality could belong to either speaker. The generated algorithm was used in the 'The 8th Letter' theater performance of Effi and Amir.
2023 Deepest Darkest Unknown
Kurina Sohn • Netherlands
Deepest Unknown v.1, led by Kurina Sohn, generates speculative stories and images of remote deep-sea environments, exploring our connection with water and the ecological consequences of human actions. I contributed the customized Stable Diffusion pipeline, trained on deep-sea and marine debris imagery, that generated the film's creatures alongside a GPT-2 co-written script.
2023 IMPAKT
CODE: Reclaiming Digital Rights, Netherlands
VOICES invites participants to record a secret and follow their voice through processing, analysis, and cloning by machine listening algorithms. In return they hear a sound-art composition in which their voice narrates the secrets of others, making the opaque inner workings of machine listening audible.
2022 Anaïs Berck
Anaïs Berck: An Algoliterary Publishing House, Belgium
During the residency we developed algoliterary publications. These are publishing experiments with algorithms and literary, scientific, and activist datasets about trees and nature. We ask ourselves: who and what is excluded, made invisible or exploited in the existent representations, discourses, tools, and practices? To address these questions, we used decision tree algorithms to sort the histories of tree nomenclature.