Linda Dounia

Linda Dounia is a Senegalese-Lebanese artist, designer, writer, and curator whose practice investigates the philosophical and environmental implications of technocapitalism. Working between analogue and digital media, she uses painting, drawing, scanners, code, generative AI, and machine learning to explore how technology shapes what is remembered, and what is made visible.

Her artistic practice is closely tied to memory and lived experience. For her works, Dounia often approaches her own context as material for alternative realities, using images and systems to give form to ways of being that are frequently excluded from dominant technological narratives. Her work is informed by science fiction, speculative design, post-colonial thought, and indigenous knowledge systems, while remaining grounded in a direct engagement with contemporary tools and materials.

Central to her work is a critical interest in algorithms: how we perceive them, how they perceive us, and who is given agency within their structures. Dounia uses AI as a site of negotiation, where bias, memory, authorship, and visibility can be examined through the process of making. Her work on speculative archiving considers how AI models might help preserve what has been lost or omitted.

Alongside her art practice, Dounia has worked extensively as a designer, with a focus on technology that can better represent and empower diverse communities. She has held design roles at organizations including IDEO.org, Google, Dalberg, and the African Leadership University, developing methods around co-creation, prototyping, play, and community-led research. This design background carries into her art, where systems are connected to questions of access, inequality, and lived consequence.

Dounia’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues and events including Christie’s, Unit London, Art X Lagos, Art Basel, the Dakar Biennale, Digital Art Fair Asia, Art Dubai, and Jeu de Paume. In 2023, she was named to the TIME100 AI list for her work on speculative archiving, and in 2024 she received Mozilla’s RISE25 award for her work in AI. She is also the founder of Cyber Baat DAO, a collective created to support artists of African descent working on the blockchain.

Across all of her practice, Dounia positions technology as something that must be questioned from within. Her work brings personal memory into contact with computational systems, asking who is represented by emerging technologies and what forms of knowledge they are able to carry forward.