Dr Kristina Mah (born in Manila, Philippines) is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher and martial arts practitioner currently living and working on Gadigal-Wangal land (Sydney), Australia. She is passionate about humanitarianism, environmental stewardship and making a contribution to peace. Her work draws inspiration from ancient wisdom traditions and emphasises embodied ways of knowing and lived experience.
Kristina's creative practice questions notions of self and transformation by exploring relationalities between time, space and bodies. She integrates somatic, contemplative, and movement-based practices as modalities of understanding wisdom and compassion. Her art practice draws on ritual, gesture and movement, cosmology, and mystic symbolism to inform tangible, spatial, and sensory experiences and embodied narratives. These are often translated into performance or mixed media installations that include video, photography and interactive technologies addressing the nature of consciousness, identity, transformation, agency and compassion across social, cultural, and ecological contexts.
Kristina has a Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy and French Studies) and a Bachelor of Design Computing from the University of Sydney. She completed a year at the College of Fine Arts (now Art and Design) at the University of New South Wales, graduating with first-class honours. In the Australian spring of 2023, Kristina graduated from the University of Sydney with a PhD in human-computer interaction. Her thesis dissertation was titled, 'Compassion-driven interaction: Bridging Buddhist Philosophy and Practice with Arts-led Research-Through-Design'. She has published in the Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery, Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Interactions Magazine, and top-tier international conferences in human-computer interaction. She has exhibited and performed her work in Australia, Singapore and Malaysia.
Kristina is currently a lecturer in design at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She also conducting transdisciplinary research with research groups at Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, the National University of Singapore, Singapore and the University of Virginia, USA. Her research aims to more deeply understand how to integrate and support wisdom, compassion and contemplative practice into real-world, more-than-human contexts.
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