About

Sana Akram is a Pakistani urbanist, media maker, a Fulbright alum and an XR creator based in Toronto, Canada. Belonging to the culturally diverse and historically rich city of Lahore, her experiences and observations since childhood, and further through architecture school led her to ponder upon multi-faceted questions over the people-space relationship and the urban imaginary. She also grew interested in exploring how such phenomena influence people—their identity and sense of belonging. In this sense, she sees the city as a constellation of networks and cyclic processes, both tangible and intangible.

In 2020, she graduated with a MS in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons School of Design, The New School, where she diversified her research-practice by implementing an interdisciplinary design approach. Her award-winning interactive documentary, Little Pakistan - Future Histories, has showcased at several international festivals and her research has been published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. For her, this marked the beginning of a progressive professional exploration of new media for civic engagement. 

Currently, she is pursuing a Doctorate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University as a recipient of the prestigious Elia Scholars Program Award with a research-creation focus on realizing the transformative, generative, and creative potential of the historical Urdu language storytelling tradition and performative art of Tilismi Dastan with emergent media technologies and XR. Her research-creation interests include immersive storytelling and performance, oral tradition, worlding and worldbuilding, emergent media, cocreation, and civic engagement.