Anna Ruth Mayer is a writer and researcher reading for a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Her doctoral project, Barbara T. Smith: Performing the Network, retrieves the Californian performance artist Barbara T. Smith as a forgotten figure in the cultural pre-history of artificial intelligence. It centres on Smith's I Am Abandoned (1976) — the first-recorded public dialogue between two chatbots, staged at Caltech in collaboration with MIT — and reads her wider work through the cybernetic models and Cold War institutions that shaped its Californian milieu.

More broadly, Anna is interested in art histories that move beyond the art object to think expansively about the systems — technological, environmental, infrastructural — that produce them.

Anna's MA in the History of Art at the Courtauld was awarded a High Distinction and a Courtauld Award. She read Philosophy and Theology at the University of Oxford, where she was awarded a Gibbs Prize for highest achievement.