micha cárdenas, PhD, is an artist and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Her book, Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke 2022), won the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women's Studies Association. cárdenas’ co-authored book The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) was published by Atropos Press. Her artwork has been described as “a seminal milestone for artistic engagement in VR” by the Spike art journal in Berlin. She is a first generation Colombian American, born in Miami.

cárdenas is an artist who was the winner of the 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the 2020 Impact Award from Indiecade and the 2016 Creative Award from the Gender Justice League. She was the recipient of the inaugural Otherwise Fellowship in 2014, a fellowship to provide support and recognition for the new voices in science fiction who are making visible the forces that are changing our view of gender today.

She is a member of the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. Her solo and collaborative artworks have been presented in museums, galleries, and biennials including Tangled Arts and Disability in Toronto (2022), the Gallatin Galleries, New York (2022), the Toronto International Film Festival Lightbox (2022), The Stamp Galery (2022), Transmediale (2021), the alt_cph Copenhagen Biennial (2020), Thessaloniki Biennial (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); House of Electronic Arts Basel (2018); Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen (2018); Henry Art Gallery (2017); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2014); the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2014); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2011); Centro Cultural del Bosque, Mexico City (2015); CECUT, Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico (2009); the Zero1 Biennial, San Jose, CA (2012); and the California Biennial, Newport Beach, CA (2010). She has given keynote talks at the Allied Media Conference, the Association of Internet Researchers, the Digital Gender Conference at Umea University in Sweden, the Dark Side of the Digital Conference, and the Vera List Center at the New School in New York. She is a member of the editorial boards for Art Journal and Art Journal Open.

cardenas’ poetry has appeared in the anthologies Troubling the Line, The &Now Awards 3, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves and Writing the Walls Down. She has published book chapters in Plants, Androids and Operators – A Post-Media Handbook, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Queer Geographies, The Critical Digital Studies Reader and the Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader. Her articles have been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ, CTheory, the Media-N Journal, the Ada Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the AI & Society Journal, as well as the magazines Mute, No More Potlucks, and Make/Shift Magazine.