Kirtz is an assistant professor of media studies and algorithmic culture in the School of Art, Media and Engineering. Before coming to ASU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University. She received her Ph.D. in Media Research and Practice from the College for Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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.
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. She is a fellow for the Center for Media, Religion and Culture and a former curator for the Media Archaeology Lab.