Bogna Konior is a researcher and strategist focused on emerging technologies. She is currently working in R&D around the question of new technologies and post-war social transitions, focused on Ukraine. She is Polish, based between Ukraine and China, where she is Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai’s Interactive Media department. Her forthcoming book with MIT Press draws on Eastern European intellectual history to reimagine the future of artificial intelligence. She is the author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity Press, 2025), a short, experimental book at the intersection of research into extraterrestrial and artificial intelligence; and co-editor of Machine Decision is not Final: China, and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2025).
Bogna Konior is a researcher and strategist focused on emerging technologies. Her work increasingly sits at the intersection of R&D, applied tech strategy, and deep academic inquiry, using long-term research to inform actionable technological frameworks. Her background is intentionally multidirectional, spanning diverse traditions in research, philosophy, emerging media, and culture. 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 China and Ukraine.
Her current applied work centers on developing R&D initiatives in Ukraine, including experimental therapies for post-war cognition recovery and societal resilience in the face of accelerating technological change. In parallel, her ongoing theoretical research draws on Eastern European intellectual histories to reimagine the future of artificial intelligence—the subject of her forthcoming book with MIT Press.
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.
This diverse background continues to anchor both her academic research and her strategic work, which is currently oscillating around the following questions:
-How can we derive conceptual and practical frameworks for new technologies from long-standing theological, philosophical, and regional traditions?
-How do we design and co-exist with truly autonomous systems, with intelligences that do not mimic human thought, but operate on non-human scales? How do we interface with them to accelerate scientific and technological discovery?
-What happens to human cognition, agency, and social architecture at moments of sudden technological rupture or crisis, when our dominant conceptual models collapse? What are the social and philosophical consequences of technological shock? How can we seize moments of systemic crisis to anchor new philosophical and technological practices?
-What is the history of ideas around truly post- and non-human cognition, agency, and personas?
-What is the history of ideas regarding deep time, historical determinism, technology, and fate? How do these ideas redefine human agency, morality, and purpose?
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.