Alumni Profile: Olivia M. Ross

June 20, 2026

SFPC Alumni Profiles is a series featuring students who are practicing poetic computation in their communities and work.

Olivia is part of the Graduating Class of 2026 this Sunday at Poetic Promenade. Join us to celebrate her!

☼⁺≀ Get tickets

Where are you from and where are you living now?

Olivia M. Ross: I'm from New York City, and still here.

When did you study at SFPC?

OR: I was a student at SFPC in Fall 2019, back when they had their 10-week intensive program at Westbeth in the West Village. Since then, I've taken Solidarity Infrastructures (Spring 2023) and SFPC Sex Ed (Summer 2024), been a TA for Digital Love Languages (Summer 2021) and Solidarity Infrastructures (Winter 2024), and taught my own Advanced Secret Keeping class in Spring 2025.

What’s been going on lately? Can you share a photo you’ve taken or image you’ve saved in the past week?

OR: This month I've being putting a lot of elbow grease into my project @zerodaybooks exploring "vernacular information studies"––out-of-print science books, working texts in electronics and engineering, radical science publications, hacker and cypherpunk zines, cybernetic and cyberfeminist theory, magic, puzzles, science fiction, philosophy... you get it. A few days ago, my friend Dave passed along this archival box full of stuff (photos, engineer's notes, etc) from Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory in the 60s. That's the box in this photo. It's really crazy. I'll be doing more research to catalogue the contents so I can flesh it out and sell to an archive, but in the meantime, I'm scanning some of it for a zine about the Atomic Age.

How would you describe your work or practice?

OR: Olivia M. Ross is a Caribbean American bookseller, documentarian, and secretkeeper from Queens. Her work practice in information preservation and distribution informs embodied research into the cybernetics of secrecy, power, and place. Current and previous collaborators include the Cyberfeminist Index, Wikipedia, The Center for Afrofuturist Studies, NEW INC, Rhizome, The Kitchen, The School for Poetic Computation, Pioneer Works, BelleMoon Productions, and NEON. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, Documentary Magazine, Letterboxd Journal, MUBI Notebook, Them, Refinery29, Bitch Media, and the YouTube video essays of young Black femmes. Ask her about Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (1987).

Can you share about a project you made while studying at SFPC?

OR: I didn't take the SFPC class about hypertext fiction (but I so wish that I did!), but I've been a big Twine fan for a while. This past winter, the Internet Archive and Grey Area commissioned me for a contribution to their Trillionth Website exhibit, and I took the leap to share a prototype for a science fiction hypertext epic called 'Pandora's Aquarium'. It's a browser-based work meant to sort of break the browser a bit: for the prologue, the text can appear above a webcam feed, with GLSL shaders that make the user appear to be underwater. The story follows three cyborgian mermaid systers as protagonists in a deep sea liberation war against 'the profanities of Man.'

As a computer programmer of Barbadian descent, I've thought a lot about the late Dr. Kamau Braithwaite's notes and writing, his theory of tidalectic change, and his vivid, punk rock Sycorax Video Style. It's been feeling really good to slide into the hypermedia tradition of one of the Great Poets of the Caribbean, as well as the brilliant women hypertext writers of the Eastgate era––I'm thinking of Shelley Jackson and Judy Malloy, for example. I hope I get to continue to write about the systers, and present their story in different ways. This new writing has been feeling like a new commitment to a 'poetic computation' practice in a different way than I've tried in the past (I was making a lot of browser-based video art from 2020-2023).

How do you define poetic computation?

OR: MYSTERY OVER MASTERY LOVE OVER FEAR HEAD OVER HEELS

What is inspiring you lately?

OR: I saw Girlfriends (1978 film) with my best friend at MoMI a few months ago. Totally fixed my aura <3

What is something you would like to learn more about?

OR: Working on @zerodaybooks has given me infolust like no other. It's such a pain to search for information online these days (as we know, Google is no longer a functioning site) so whenever I run into like a scientist or historian IRL? I try to get their contact information. It's really nice to have relationships with people who've got real experience to answer some of the questions I've been encountering, especially as AI slop buries niche information.

What is in your poetic toolkit?

OR: Lately when I'm writing hypertext, I do a lot of the drafting in org-mode. So shout out to org-mode. Otherwise, I've been nerdmaxxing: a lot of amateur radio, astronomy, weather satellites, wardriving. So a big part of my 'toolkit' has been getting up and on the move, letting my physical body engage with the information radiating through physical space all around us. I like playing with wireless technology that lets me scan and ping back what's been scanning and pinging me. One young woman and her SDR dongle against the world.

What’s a song you’ve been listening to lately?

OR: Jackie's Strength by Tori Amos.