Curriculum Vitae
Ahnjili ZhuParris, PhD — AI artist, engineer and researcher. The Netherlands / New York.
Education
2020 - 2024 PhD in Medicine
Leiden University, Netherlands
2016 - 2018 MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience
Radboud University, Netherlands
2012 - 2016 BSc in Biomedical Sciences (with Honours)
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Awards, Fellowships & Grants
2025 Public AI Creative Fellowship
MetaGov • USA
A six-month fellowship 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 Grant
Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie • Netherlands • €7,500
Project grant for DEEPFAKE: a video essay and interactive installation, which examines the impact of deepfake technology and builds public awareness of its ethical and societal challenges. The work weaves participants' face and voice data into a personalized narrative, and was presented in 2025 at Noorderlicht (NL) and Identity 2.0 (UK).
2024 Fresh Perspective Grant
Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie • Netherlands
Grant supporting Screen-to-Soundscape, awarded under a programme for cross-sector collaborations that offer new perspectives on current crises, including discrimination and social inequality.
2024 Processing Foundation Fellowship
Processing Foundation • USA
Fellowship supporting the development of Screen-to-Soundscape as free and open-source software within the Processing Foundation's community.
2023 European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists
EFFEA • Europe
Awarded to the VOICES Collective to develop VOICES, an interactive installation that exposes the inner workings of machine listening. Together with support from IMPAKT, the grant funded the installation's premiere at Ars Electronica 2023.
2021 Mozilla Creative Media Award
Mozilla Foundation • USA
Future Wake (futurewake.com) turns predictive policing upside down: instead of predicting crime, it lets citizens predict police brutality. We used machine learning to predict who, when, and how the next victim would die, and deepfake algorithms to give the predicted victims a face.
Exhibitions & Commissions
2024 New Media Art Conference
CICA Museum, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Fashion Police Drones was presented at the New Media Art Conference. Drones armed with custom fashion-recognition algorithms tracked visitors against audience-defined criteria for "fashion crimes", probing the boundaries of surveillance, automation in law enforcement, and cultural profiling.
2024 Screen-to-Soundscape / Techno Disobedience
Constant, Processing Foundation, Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie • Belgium, USA, Netherlands
Commission developing Screen-to-Soundscape, a speculative prototype that turns the browser into an immersive soundscape: layered voices read on-screen text in unison, and spatial audio places each passage where it sits on the page, reimagining navigation for blind and visually impaired users.
2023 VOICES at Ars Electronica
Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria
Premiere of VOICES. Participants record a secret, follow their voice through the machine-listening pipeline that analyzes and clones it, and finally hear their own voice narrate the secrets of others. Supported by the European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists and IMPAKT.
2023 VOICES at IMPAKT Festival
IMPAKT Festival, Utrecht, Netherlands
Following its Ars Electronica premiere, VOICES was presented at the IMPAKT Festival in Utrecht as part of the CODE exhibition.
2023 Digital Pioneers: A Visionary Prelude
Commissioned by Stichting IMPAKT • Utrecht, Netherlands
A commissioned digital artwork that opened the IMPAKT Festival 2023: deepfakes of three prominent tech CEOs deliver the festival's introduction, their cloned voices modulated into a single harmonized chorus, a cheeky meditation on authority, authorship, and synthetic media.
2023 Articulating Data
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Babble-on, a web installation, lets visitors record a few sentences and receive a personalized "babble tape": their voice sliced and remixed into indistinct chatter they can download to disguise conversations from audio surveillance.
2021 This Machine Is Black
Identity 2.0, London, United Kingdom
An exhibition exploring how Afrofuturism can alleviate the normative pressure that AI puts on non-normative bodies. With few exceptions, the Black experience has largely been invisible in AI datasets; I trained a series of generative AI algorithms on Afrofuturist datasets to envision the future of the Afrofuturist aesthetic.
Residencies & Collaborations
2022 - 2024 Shibboleth: Creation of a Hybrid Voice
With Effi & Amir • Brussels, Belgium
We produced a "dual voice" that transforms fluidly from one recognizable speaker into another mid-speech, switching at points of sonic uncertainty where an articulation or tonal quality could belong to either voice. The algorithm was used in Effi & Amir's theater performance The 8th Letter.
2023 Deepest Darkest Unknown
With Kurina Sohn • Netherlands
Deepest Unknown v.1 is an artistic collaboration with AI, generating speculative stories and images that illuminate the mysteries and potential losses of remote underwater environments. The installation combined video of creatures generated with a customized Stable Diffusion model (trained on deep-sea and marine-debris imagery), GPT-2 dialogue, and deep-sea soundscapes, inviting viewers to reassess our relationship with water and technology's impact on how we perceive nature. My contribution: customizing the Stable Diffusion pipeline.
2023 IMPAKT: CODE Residency
CODE: Reclaiming Digital Rights • Utrecht, Netherlands
Residency in IMPAKT's CODE programme, during which VOICES was researched and developed ahead of its Ars Electronica premiere.
2022 Anaïs Berck: An Algoliterary Publishing House
Brussels, Belgium
During this residency we developed algoliterary publications: publishing experiments with algorithms and literary, scientific, and activist datasets about trees and nature. Asking who and what is excluded, made invisible, or exploited in existing representations, we used decision-tree algorithms to sort the histories of tree nomenclature.
Works in Collections
2021 This Machine Is Black
Identity 2.0 • London, United Kingdom
See also: publications & interviews and talks & workshops.