Hi! I’m an anthropologist and digital ethnographer, currently based in Shanghai as an Assistant Professor at the USC–SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, a joint initiative between the University of Southern California and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

My research examines creative entrepreneurship, transnational labor, digital media, fashion, and embodied performance in contemporary China. I explore how people build creative lives through style, aesthetic practice, and self-presentation across physical and digital platforms. My work also considers how race and gender shape visibility, opportunity, and forms of creative labour within China’s creative industries. In addition, I study the cultural life of artificial intelligence in China, looking at how AI is imagined, visualized, and experienced not only as infrastructure but as a social force, design aesthetic, and vision of the future.

I teach and write across anthropology, digital ethnography, media, communication and creative writing. I hold a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam, an MA in Sociology from Fudan University in Shanghai, and a BA in Social Anthropology from Panteion University in Athens. During my PhD, I was also a visiting researcher at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley.