Rashida Kamal
About
Hi there! I’m Rashida – I’m a Bangladeshi-born American, living between the worlds of journalism, art, and academia.
In journalism, I’ve worked at The Guardian as a data journalist, reporting on algorithms, climate, and the labor market. I’ve also worked as a software developer creating in-house tools at POLITICO. Today, I lead a small team of data journalists for a financial intelligence company focused on private markets.
In the art world, most of my adventures have been made possible by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) – a department infamous to some, obscure to others. While doing my master’s at ITP, I founded Trash Club with a couple of friends. What began as a reading club investigating the history, ontology, and anthropology of waste, blossomed into a newsletter and a VR poetics project featuring the NJ Meadowlands. My collaborator, Morgan Mueller, and I were lucky enough to be a part of NEW INC’s Creative Science incubator, and presented our work at the New Museum as a part of NEW INC’s Embodied Ecologies event. If you’re interested in learning more, check out our piece “Waste as Witness” in Pioneer Works’ Broadcast. Since then, I’ve begun to expand my artistic interests into food art (arguably, this actually began with an exploding, capacitive touch cake I made in grad school). I’ve created some food art experiences at Wonderville, in collaboration with other live performance artists. (If I’ve ever served you cake and whimsy at a Brooklyn rave, you’re welcome.) Today, I’m working on expanding an old project called Sunday Supper Club into something more. You can learn about Caravanserai, my 2025 Silk-Road-inspired pop-up dinner created in collaboration with chef Deanna Greene on our Are.na channel for the event. I’m deeply interested in making archival research, history, and science accessible to people beyond academic writing, and I consider Caravanserai an experiment in this vein.
Finally, in academia, I serve as an adjunct professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where I’ve taught data storytelling since 2022, and at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where I’ve taught the Interactive Media Arts capstone class since 2024. I’m currently knee-deep in an independent research project looking at the history of Bengal and the East India Company, with an intent to trace the early precedents for the entanglement of state and corporate power. I spent my last birthday at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and it was the most fun I’ve had celebrating since my best friend and I co-hosted a laser-tag + ice-cream cake party for my 34th. I consider my independent research to be an experiment in public scholarship – to doing academic research “out loud.” I’m interested in asking: what does it look like to bring academic research and rigor to life beyond the traditional modes of publication? How can archives (their knowledge, their questions, their silences) be accessible and engaging for as many people as possible? In a sense, this work is a continuation of my master’s thesis at ITP, What Can A Library Do?, which asked how archives and their interfaces made different modes of knowledge production possible.
This summer, I’m launching a project called The Interloper as a vehicle for documenting and sharing my research endeavors, so stay tuned.
As you might have guessed, I have not optimized my career or life for legibility to strangers – instead, I am aiming for what I call a “big juicy life.” Thanks for reading anyway!