Author Raqi Syed

Raqi Syed

Raqi Syed is a Senior Lecturer, School of Design, at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She’s worked as a Visual Effects Artist on films such as Tangled, District 9, Avatar, Dawn of The Planet of the Apes, and The Hobbit Trilogy. In 2017, The Los Angeles Times pegged Raqi for its list of 100 Industry professionals who can help fix Hollywood’s Diversity Problem. Her writing focuses on film and gender, new media technologies, and the history and business of visual effects. Her essays have appeared in TechCrunch, Vice, Salon, Quartz, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Raqi is a 2018 Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Fellow and a Turner Fellow. She holds an MFA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington.

Total Cinema: Or, “What is VR?”

Raqi Syed

March 2019

Feature Articles

In the late 1980s, throughout the ‘90s, and well into the 2000s, MIT Principle Research Scientist, Gloriana Davenport investigated the idea that movies had begun to operate as a kind of new “elastic” media. She...