Anna Ruth Mayer is a historian of art and technology. She is currently reading for a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Her doctoral project, provisionally titled Barbara T. Smith: Performing the Network, retrieves the Californian performance artist Barbara T. Smith as a forgotten figure in the cultural pre-history of artificial intelligence.

More broadly, Anna is interested in the influence of the creative counterculture and its art-making avant-gardes on the development of early artificial intelligence and other emergent technologies in Southern California in the long 1970s.

Anna holds an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld and a BA in Philosophy and Theology from the University of Oxford.