Şerife (Sherry) Wong
b. 1978
Şerife is a Turkish-Hawaiian artist working on AI governance.
She is currently an affiliate at O'Neil Risk Consulting and Algorithmic Auditing and an affiliate research scientist at Kidd Lab, UC Berkeley, serves on the board of directors for Gray Area and Tech Inquiry, and is the culture and AI governance lead at the Tech Diplomacy Network.
Her work advocating for justice in AI and more active roles for artists in policymaking has been recognized through several awards: a residency fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, a research fellowship at the Berggruen Institute, a residency at Medlab, University of Colorado, was selected for the 100 Women in AI Ethics list in 2021. As a leader in the art and technology space, she has served on jury award committees for Ars Electronica, Burning Man, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Şerife is a frequent collaborator with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford to bridge conceptual art with the social sciences. She has partnered with them on: Fluxus Landscape, a map of 500 actors in AI ethics and governance, Fairer Tomorrow, an immersive experience of political and economic solutions generated during the Covid 19 crisis, and helped organize the symposium Innovating AI Governance with the Rockefeller Foundation and Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto.
She has has been a fellow and researcher at the the Berggruen Institute and served on the board of directors for Digital Peace Now, and as an advisor at Applied Mindfulness. Previously, she was an Artist in Residence and creator of the Impact Program at Autodesk Pier 9, and worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the assistant editor at Artnet Magazine.
Her work uses research and activism as a medium of art to create performances, social sculptures, paintings, videos, happenings, and interactive web-based work. Şerife has had solo art exhibits in New York (I-20 Gallery), San Francisco, Vienna, and Mexico City; and exhibited internationally at Art Basel Miami, Shanghai Art Fair, FIAC Paris, ARCO Madrid, and Art Cologne among others.
She has given talks at the Museum of Image and Sound and the Observatory for Innovation at the Institute of Advanced Studies in São Paulo; the Glass Room, Gray Area Festival, French American Cultural Society, Villa Albertine, and Swissnex in San Francisco; RightsCon; Mozfest House, Amsterdam, and the National Humanities Center among many others.
She is currently working on a public education project, Artificial Life Coach, which will be launching this year as a recipient of a Mozilla Creative Award. She is also working with Global Voices as part of Omidyar’s Future of Data Challenge to look at data governance narratives in El Salvador, Brazil, Türkiye, Sudan, and India.
She enjoys helping her friends work on large-scale art projects for Burning Man featuring koi ponds, boomboxes, and zoetropes. Her husband is an amazing magician.