Paulina Lanz is a scholar-practitioner bridging community voices and academic inquiry through participatory research and digital storytelling. Currently completing her Ph.D. in Communication at USC’s Annenberg School, she specializes in borderlands studies, material culture, and transnational media studies that center marginalized voices and challenge dominant narratives.

As Research Associate and Team Co-Lead for the European Research Council-funded Sonic Street Technologies project, Paulina has mapped over 70 Sonidero communities across the United States, creating digital archives and multimedia documentation that serve as community-led models for cultural preservation. Her work as Lead Organizer for the MacArthur Foundation-funded «Imagining a Plant-Based Democracy» initiative demonstrates her commitment to participatory research that bridges academic inquiry with community organizing.

Paulina’s research program investigates digital storytelling under repression, forced migration, trauma, and memory studies, with particular focus on how material objects and digital technologies shape cultural memory across borders. Her emerging book project, «Absented Stories,» involves collaborative storytelling with asylum seekers, developing ethical frameworks for digital humanities research with vulnerable populations.

With extensive teaching experience across universities in Mexico, Australia, and the United States, she develops community-engaged pedagogies that center student voice and cultural wealth, particularly supporting Latinx students and first-generation college students. Her bilingual expertise and transborder project experience uniquely position her to create research that serves both scholarly advancement and community empowerment, embodying the scholar-practitioner model that bridges academic rigor with social justice impact.