Jori Snels is a lecturer in the Media Studies department. She is also a cultural analysis scholar whose research focuses on imaginations of the future in media art from China, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Jori earned a joint doctorate PhD (2019-2025) at the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) and Western Sydney University (Institute for Culture and Society). Her dissertation, titled Sinofuturism as Worlding: Imagining Futures in Sinophone Digital Art, examined how Sinophone digital art imagines technology-infused futures in response to techno-utopian and techno-orientalist imaginations of those futures. The study adopts a theoretical framework that consists of three concepts – Sinophone, worlding, and Sinofuturism – which are mobilized to analyze how future-oriented Sinophone digital art brings into being technology-infused futures of Sinophone words. The study focuses on four themes that are prevalent in imaginations of such futures: connectedness, embodiment, self-care, and artificial intelligence. Case studies include artworks by artists such as LuYang, Lawrence Lek, aaajiao, Miao Ying, Li Yi-Fan, Ye Funa, Betty Apple, and Fei Yining, as well as various art exhibitions.

Jori is a lecturer in the Media Studies department, where she teaches in the BA program Media & Culture and the MA program Global Cross-Media Culture. She also supervises theses in the BA and MA, including in the Film Studies MA. Previously, she was a lecturer at Leiden University, where she taught in the BA program Film and Literary Studies, and at University College Utrecht (Utrecht University), where she taught skills.

Prior to her PhD, Jori completed a research master’s degree in Art Sudies (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam and a bachelor’s degree in Language and Culture Studies (major: modern art and culture) at Utrecht University, spending a semester as an exchange student at Free University Berlin.

Jori's research interests span futurism, temporality, media art, worlding and worldbuilding, climate change, Sinophone studies, blue humanities, island studies, and posthumanism. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she combines cultural analysis with methods and insights from art history, ethnography, and media studies.

Jori's work has been published in NECSUS, Screen Bodies, World Art, Art and the Public Sphere, and Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis. She presented her research at numerous international conferences, as well as (co-)organizing several conferences, including the 2021 ASCA Workshop “We Are All in this Together” – Connectivity and Community in Isolation.

Through curatorial projects and public speaking, Jori expands her academic research into public contexts. For instance, she curated the video art screening Stories from Tomorrow: Sinophone Imaginations of Resilient Futures at Framer Framed and was interviewed about her PhD research on the podcast Onder Mediadoctoren. She regularly speaks at cultural events in the Netherlands and abroad (e.g. at the Nieuwe Instituut, Framer Framed, and the Australian Centre on China in the World), and has given guest lectures at the National Taipei University of Education, Utrecht University, and University of Amsterdam.

Jori's PhD project was funded by the PhDs in the Humanities scholarship by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), alongside additional funding from the Prof. dr. H.W. van Os Fonds Travel Grant and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfondsbeurs. During her BA and MA, she was awarded the Horizonfonds grant, the A.S.C. Academy Studiefonds grant, the Erasmus Program scholarship, and DIA-Stipendium scholarship to support research and study-abroad activities.