Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado

Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado is Kanaka Maoli from Nānākuli, Hawaiʻi and a PhD student in English with a Designated Emphasis in Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She received her BA in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and her MA in English at UC Riverside. Her current research interests are Indigenous Studies, Speculative Fiction, Digital Art, Disability Studies, Science & Technology Studies, and Decolonial Futurities. Nicole’s love for studying and writing Speculative Fiction has led her to becoming a Research Scholar for the The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Fall Thematic in 2020 and an on-going collaboration with the University of California Speculative Futures Collective. In summer 2021, Nicole created a virtual seminar, titled “Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Studies for Artists,” with Human Resources Los Angeles (a performance-based museum) that catered to cultivating conversations regarding the field of Indigenous Studies with artists and art-workers based in California, the US, and internationally. Her article “Wandering the World’s Most Isolated Metropolis: Structured Dispossession & Post-Apocalyptic Stress Syndrome in the Film Waikiki” has been published in the Science Fiction Research Association’s journal, and she has a forthcoming sci-fi short story, “Across Lewa & Kikilo,” in the anthology The Fantastic in the Pacific.