Kirtz is an assistant professor of media studies and algorithmic culture in the School of Art, Media and Engineering. She is an affiliated faculty member in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication Graduate Program as well as affiliate faculty and member of the AI & Ethics and AI & Sustainability workgroups at the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. Kirtz is the founding Co-Director of the TechnoMaterials Lab, an experimental space for research on connections across physical and digital states of media technology.
Her work addresses material aspects and pressing social issues in algorithmic rhetoric, digital media and technology, and data-driven culture from a human-centric perspective. Her current research interrogates how gendered and racial inequalities extend from historical media to platform economies and AI-driven human-computer interactions and lies at the intersections between new materialism, feminist theory, science and technology studies and media archaeology.
She received her Ph.D. in Media Research and Practice from the College for Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she was a fellow for the Center for Media, Religion and Culture and curator for the Media Archaeology Lab.