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Arts Division
Film and Digital Media Department
Graduate Student in Social Documentation
Graduate
Thursdays at 12PM in Kresge 1202A
Film and Digital Media
Urmila is a documentarian, tenant organizer, and researcher, interested in understanding systems of oppression and documenting the people building alternatives. Before starting at UCSC, Urmila was a Senior Policy Analyst at the DC-based non-profit Upturn, where they studied the material harms of technology and automated decision-making on marginalized groups in the United States, especially in the realms of policing, housing, and hiring. They are filming their thesis project about an autonomous tenants union in Washington D.C., and its struggle to secure dignified, affordable housing.
- Community organizing and depictions of it in media -- especially documentary and narrative film.
- Housing organizing and autonomous tenants unions
- The physical and material impacts of technology and automated decision-making (i.e environmental impacts, discriminatory impacts)
- The practice of theater and performance in community organizing + historical memory-making / preserving
- Theater of the oppressed
- Environmental impacts of data centers and the movement to organize against them
- DC AHFP Grant Awardee 2025
- 2024 Humanities DC Independent Practitioner Fellowship
- ARI Graduate Fellow
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