Leona Nikolić

Leona Nikolić is an SSHRC-funded PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University (Montréal, Canada). Her research examines the present-day relationships and historical interdependencies between astrology, computation, and data analysis. Drawing from the fields of religion and media, science and technology studies, media theory, material culture, and history of computation, her doctoral dissertation demonstrates how current efforts by Silicon Valley tech companies to position generative AI technologies as omniscient, god-like entities with oracular capabilities can be historically situated within longer attempts to calculate the future, from magical practices of divination to statistical forecasting to algorithmic prediction.

Leona was a research intern in 2025 at Microsoft Research with the Social Media Collective, exploring the technocultural implications of magical discourse, design, and branding of generative AI models and has previously worked as a strategic foresight policy analyst for the Government of Canada.

She is a member of the Media History Research Centre and the Machine Agencies research group at the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.