Cienna Davis

Cienna Davis employs Black feminist frameworks to analyze media, culture, and technology, highlighting how marginalized communities resist platform bias, surveillance, and exploitation.

Cienna Davis is a community organizer, cultural worker, and researcher. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Ethnic Studies and Communication from the University of California San Diego where she was a McNair Scholar. She earned her master’s degree in North American Studies at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin. Her writing and speaking on Afrofuturism, Black feminism, colorism, digital blackface, popular culture, and community organizing have been published in academic journals, magazines, books, and newspapers in the US, Germany, Switzerland, and Korea.

Davis co-founded the diasporic Black feminist collective Soul Sisters Berlin where she organized social events, performances, hair workshops, discussions, and art retreats with the goal of educating, empowering, and connecting Black women and femmes in Berlin.

She studies transnational Black feminist networks and afro-textured hair as a language and technology that facilitates tactile networks of communication, care, and exchange across the African diaspora. She explores these topics through cultural critique, performance ethnography, and multimodal research methods, including film-making and art curation. 

Davis’s research also examines the role of digital technology and the Internet in transforming processes of racialization and racial identity formation with recent publications on digital blackface and the appropriation of Black femme affect, gestures, and aesthetics online.