TIERA TANKSLEY
Speaker + 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics + Expert on Justice, Technology & Education
LOCATED NEAR: Los Angeles, California
SPEAKING TOPICS
AI Ethics
AI, EdTech and Educational (In)Equity
STEM+CS Education
Social Media Activism and Algorithmic Bias
Youth Wellness and Digital Thriving
Abolitionist Approaches to AI and Tech Design
Urban Education
Abolitionist Pedagogies
Popular talks
Deepfakes, Death Videos and Digital Racism: How AI is Altering the Mental Health Landscape for Today’s Youth
Freedom Dreaming in the Digital: How Black Youth “Talk Back” and “Bring Wreck” to Antiblack Technologies Through Abolitionist Tech Design
Teaching to Transgress …the Algorithm: Fostering Algorithmic Agency and Sociotechnical Consciousness in the Age of AI
EVENT TYPES
KEYNOTES
LECTURES
FIRESIDE CHATS
PANELS
Workshops
VIRTUAL EVENTS
INTERNATIONAL EVENTS
Dr. Tiera Tanksley is a Senior Researcher whose work examines the socioemotional, mental health and academic impacts of digital and artificially intelligent technologies on Black youth. Her work examines anti-Blackness as the “default setting” of schools and school-based technologies, including GenAI chatbots, facial recognition systems, weapons detection systems, and more. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist, and rewrite algorithmically biased technologies to produce more-just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color across the diaspora. In 2020, Dr. Tanksley founded the Race, Abolition and Artificial Intelligence summer program - a critical science and technology program that prepares young people to have more critical, agentic and algorithmically-conscious relationships with AI and digital tech.
Dr. Tanksley earned her PhD from the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies where Dr. Safiya Noble served as her dissertation advisor and chair of her committee. Since completing her doctorate, she has served as an expert AI research consultant for organizations such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the National Institute for Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education Office of Technology, Children and Screens, Digital Promise and Common Sense Media to name a few. In 2023, Dr. Tanksley was awarded the Public Voices in Technology fellowship by the MacArthur Foundation and the Op Ed Project, and was subsequently named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI. In 2025, she was awarded an AI in Education research grant from the Spencer Foundation, and was featured in a critical AI documentary, Ghost in the Machine, that premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
GET SOCIAL WITH Tiera Tanksley
Tiera Tanksley in the media
Howard University: Racism, Surveillance, and AI Panel
Articles Featuring Tiera Tanksley:
100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics | Women in AI Ethics
Public Voices Fellows to Shape Discourse on Technology in the Public Interest | MacArthur Foundation
Tiera Tanksley Sundance Collab
Podcasts with Tiera Tanksley:
