Bogna Konior is Assistant Professor of Media Theory and founding faculty at AI and Culture Center at NYU Shanghai. She is the author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity Press, 2025), a number 1 Amazon USA bestseller in Media Studies, which draws on the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to build an original theory of the internet and AI as a first-contact scenario. She is also co-editor of Machine Decision is not Final: China, and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2025), which reconstructs AI’s intellectual history through Chinese thought. Her forthcoming book with MIT Press draws on 20th-century Eastern European intellectual history and the work of Stanisław Lem to reimagine AI. She is Polish, and currently based between Shanghai, China and Kyiv, Ukraine, where she works in applied technological and cultural projects.
Bogna Konior is a scholar and researcher focused on emerging technologies. Through academic research, applied projects, narrative strategy, and scenario planning, she develops conceptual and practical approaches to technological change.
She is currently Assistant Professor at the Interactive Media department, and the founding faculty member of the AI & Culture Center at NYU Shanghai. She is Polish, and splits her time between Ukraine and China.
Her current academic research draws on Eastern European intellectual histories to reimagine the future of artificial intelligence—the subject of her forthcoming book with MIT Press. In parallel, with psychoanalyst Yuliia Leites she is the co-founder of the Overand Institute for Recovery Technologies, an initiative at the intersection of emerging technologies and resocialization in Ukraine.
She grew up in Wałbrzych, Poland, and graduated from a school run by the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a religious congregation founded by the 19th-century Polish Catholic mystic Marcelina Darowska.
She is the author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity Press, 2025), which draws on the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to build an original theory of the internet and AI as a first-contact scenario. She is also co-editor of Machine Decision is not Final: China, and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2025), which reconstructs AI’s intellectual history through Chinese thought.
In 2025, she was a mentor in the DATAS residency for artists working across new media, governance, and sovereignty in Central and Eastern Europe and the Southern Caucasus. In 2024, she was an affiliate researcher at Antikythera, a think tank focused on planetary computation and synthetic intelligence, and served as a mentor at Medialab Matadero’s Synthetic Minds Lab, guiding interdisciplinary teams in developing experimental projects around AI. Her work has been presented internationally at the University of Cambridge, the Goethe Institute, e-flux, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, alongside regular collaborations with art and research institutions including the Ljubljana Biennale, Fundação de Serralves, Singapore Art Museum, and ZKM Center for Art and Media.