About

Payton Croskey is a tech justice scholar designing liberatory tools for a more just world. She is a Ph.D. student in Jennifer Jacob’s Expressive Computation Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), a 2025 recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP), and a 2025 Processing Foundation Fellow. Her research sits at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), and Afrofuturism, where she develops theoretical frameworks and technical methodologies for ethically collecting, storing, and modeling Black cultural data in AI and AR. She aims to enable Black and Brown communities to secure their place in the future historical record, ensuring that emergent technologies elevate and empower these groups by reflecting their histories.

This is a continuation of her undergraduate research in Princeton University’s African American Studies and Computer Science departments. There, she researched efforts to resist surveillance systems and what she coined the Augmented Undercommons, a fugitive maker space where inhabitants redefine security, community and technological innovation apart from Western society and standards. Payton is also the former creative content director and lead researcher of Ruha Benjamin’s Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, where she collaborated with grassroots organizations, led the lab’s inaugural international conference and developed a transformative digital repository of liberatory technologies housed on GitHub.