Jason Edward Lewis is a 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Fellow, nominated by Mashinka Hakopian for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Prize as part of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics’ Matter of Intelligence Focus Theme.

Jason Edward Lewis is the co-director of Abundant Intelligences, an Indigenous-led research program that is reimagining how to conceptualize, design, develop, and deploy Artificial Intelligences inspired by Indigenous Knowledge systems. The project explores methods for improving AI to better serve Indigenous communities, and in the process discover ways to make AI better for all. Lewis is also a digital media theorist, poet, and software designer who teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. His research interests include emergent media theory and history, as well as methodologies for conducting art-led technology research. With the artist Skawennati, he runs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, which has been conducting research-creation at the intersection of Indigenous cultures and advanced technologies since 2005. His creative and production work has been featured at Ars Electronica, Mobilefest, Elektra, Urban Screens, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, FILE, the Hawaiian International Film Festival, and in seven solo exhibitions. Before joining academia, he worked in a range of industrial research settings, including Interval Research, US West’s Advanced Technology Group, and the Institute for Research on Learning, and he founded and ran a research studio for the venture capital firm Arts Alliance. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the 2025 winner of the Social Sciences and Humanities Impact Award.

Abundant Intelligences’ approach is grounded in Indigenous epistemologies containing robust conceptual frameworks for understanding how technology can be created in ways that integrate it into existing lifeways, support the flourishing of future generations, and optimize for abundance rather than scarcity. Bringing diverse thinking, cultures, and protocols together, it hopes to demonstrate ways to rebuild AI’s epistemological foundations and transform these tools’ current role in reinforcing colonial practices of manipulation, exclusion, extraction, and eradication into engines of abundance that enable us to care better for ourselves, our communities, and our world.

“Foregrounding Indigenous knowledges as an epistemic framework for technologies yet to be designed, Jason Edward Lewis’s interventions into critical AI studies offer urgent counter-narratives to how ‘intelligence’ has been understood in the past and propose how it might be understood otherwise in the future. […] At a moment when an elite coterie of technocratic actors seeks to consolidate control over technologies that steer us toward ever-more-annihilatory outcomes, Abundant Intelligences insists that other technologies and other outcomes remain thinkable.”

—Mashinka Hakopian, Jane Lombard Prize Council