Lia Tarachansky is a filmmaker, scholar, and educator whose work operates at the intersection of documentary media, Digital Humanities, and critical theory. She is in the final stages of completing her PhD at York University in Canada. Her research advances decolonial and community-centred methodologies in emerging media, with a particular focus on the political and epistemological capacities of Augmented Reality.

 

Her scholarship investigates how immersive and locative media can function as counter-archival interventions, reconfiguring dominant visual regimes and contesting colonial spatial imaginaries. Grounded in practice-based research, Tarachansky integrates documentary production with theoretical inquiry, positioning creative practice as a rigorous mode of knowledge production. Her work develops accessible technological workflows that enable activists and marginalized communities to author their own augmented narratives, thereby redistributing representational authority and expanding the field of participatory media.

 

Drawing on more than fifteen years of experience in documentary filmmaking, Tarachansky’s research engages questions of visual sovereignty, relational ethics, and public pedagogy. Her films, which have screened internationally and received multiple awards, inform a scholarly practice that bridges critical analysis and material production.

 

As an lecturer at York University, Toronto Metropolitan University, and Humber College, she is recognized for her inclusive, decolonial pedagogical approach. Her academic contributions situate emerging media within broader debates in media studies, digital culture, and decolonial theory, demonstrating how creative practice can operate simultaneously as scholarship, intervention, and public-facing research.