Leonardo Graduate Abstracts is an evolving international and interdisciplinary peer-review database of dissertation and thesis abstracts (PhD, MFA, and Master’s) that deal with topics at the intersections of art, science, and technology. This English-language database was established at Pomona College (Claremont, CA), under the direction of editor-in-chief Sheila Pinkel and continues under Mary Anne Stanisziewski of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The highest-ranking and highly ranked abstracts of 2025 will be published in Leonardo journal (see upcoming Vol. 59, No. 5, October 2026). We are pleased to present below the top-ranked dissertation and thesis abstracts of 2025, and we congratulate the authors.
Highest-Rated Abstracts
Patricia Belen, "Counter-Archives in Digital Spaces"
Pierre Jolivet, "Sound Art and Sensorial Perception: A Practice Based Study"
Qiaodan Liu, "Towards a Technology of Trees in Architecture - from ‘Epistemes’ to ‘Dispositifs'
Matheus Da Rocha Montanari, "Cosmotechnical garden: the poetics of care rooted in amerindian thought and latin american art"
Ioannis Sidiropoulos, "Sound, Motion, and the Brain: Exploring Movement Improvisation and Brain Activity in Response to Audio Stimuli to Create an Experimental Data-Driven Exhibition-Performance"
Highly Ranked Abstracts
Golnoush Behmanesh, "A-Eye Map: A Comparative Analysis of AI-Predicted Attention Maps in Cross-Cultural Design"
Joana Burd, "Poetics of vibration: Deployments of Technology in Contact with the Body as Affective Memory"
Siyu Fang, "Invisible Margins: Speculative Wearables Challenging Social Norms for Introverts"
Yuhong Fu, "A Digital Cartography of Ghosts That Thou Dost Call Memory"
Erin Gee, "A Feminist Framework for Biofeedback Music"
Amias Hanley, "Aisles of Mimetica: Tracing the Role of Acoustic Mimicry Across Species and Systems"
Claus Lam, "Metamaterial"
Kentaro Okumura, "Radical Cartographies as Cosmotechnics: Tautology and Groundlessness Latent in the Act of Mapping"
Paula Perissinotto, "Living Archive: Preserving and Expanding Cultural Memory in the Field of Art and Technology"
Hau To Charmaine Tang, "Painted Architectures: An Investigation Using Computer Vision to Translate Paint Strokes into Spatial Form"
Canhe Yang, "The Gagged Conspirators: on GenAI and the Collaborative Practice of Citizens under Digital Colonisation"
We also wish to acknowledge the following authors of notable abstracts: Angelo Bartolome, Aishwarya Bhattbhatt, Chen Berkman, Nastaran Bizmark, kevin blackistone, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Terence Broad, Emma Brunelli, Leslie Deere, Jimi DePriest, Karin Dilge, Sarah Dixon, Inês Flórido, Yihan Ge, Nigel Guérin-Garnett, Noel Haufs, Mariia Korneeva, Aranya Khurana, Boya Liang, Kelsey Maes, Christina Mann, Antonio Labella Martínez, Antonella Mazzoni, Matthew Nazarian, Jiayun Qiu, Abhishek Rakshit, Megan Ratliff, Samarth Reddy, Nooshin Rezaei, Michele Rinaldi, Philip Ryan, Guido Salimbeni, Dorothy Santos, Yati Sharma, Po-Jen Shih, So Young Song, Peter Toyne, Shira Wachsmann, Ruichao Wang, Dionysios Zamplaras, Bao Han (Iris) Zhang, Jingwen Zhang, and Yujia Zhang.