In a time when global stories are flattened into headlines and digital platforms often strip nuance from identity, Aviva Taeidkashani stands out as a multidimensional force—equal parts technologist, poet, and activist. Her work is rooted in complexity: the complexity of diaspora, of memory, of cultural preservation in the digital age.
Taeidkashani, an Iranian-American innovator, is not your typical tech entrepreneur. She’s just as likely to quote Rumi as she is to cite blockchain protocols. Her mission: to build technological systems that do not erase marginalized voices, but amplify and protect them.
In the growing field of ethical tech and digital humanities, she’s quickly becoming one of the most influential thinkers—and yet, most people have never heard of her. That’s exactly how she prefers it.
A Life of In-Between
Aviva Taeidkashani was born in 1991 in Los Angeles to Iranian parents who left Tehran in the 1980s, part of the intellectual and artistic diaspora that fled after the revolution. Her father, a journalist, and her mother, a professor of Persian literature, instilled in her a deep respect for storytelling and scholarship.
From a young age, Aviva was caught in the tension of dual identity. “I was American at school and Iranian at home,” she once said during a panel at the International Literature Festival in Berlin. “In one world, I was encouraged to code; in the other, I was told stories of a homeland I barely knew.”
This hybrid upbringing helped shape her early fascination with systems of translation—linguistic, emotional, technological. She began writing poetry in both Farsi and English by the age of 14 and developed an early interest in programming through open-source communities. She described her adolescence as a “collision of verse and logic.”
Academic Foundations and Early Vision
After completing high school, Taeidkashani attended Stanford University, where she double-majored in Comparative Literature and Computer Science—a combination few others dared to pursue. Her academic work focused on the intersection of memory, exile, and artificial intelligence.
Her undergraduate thesis, “Languages of Loss: Encoding Diaspora through Digital Narratives,” received national recognition. It explored how digital platforms could be reimagined as tools for preserving endangered cultural stories—particularly those of diasporic communities who lacked physical archives or institutional support.
She continued her research at Oxford’s Internet Institute, where she earned a master’s degree in Social Data Science. There, she explored questions about surveillance, algorithmic bias, and the erasure of minority histories from digital platforms.
NoorNet: Memory as Resistance
In 2019, Taeidkashani co-founded NoorNet, a nonprofit tech organization dedicated to building secure digital memory platforms for displaced communities. NoorNet, which means “light” in Persian and Arabic, offers an encrypted storytelling app that enables users to preserve oral histories, photographs, documents, and poems—all stored securely using decentralized blockchain technology.
NoorNet became especially critical in regions facing internet blackouts or political repression. Afghan students used it to document their education journeys after the Taliban’s return. Iranian activists used it to preserve protest footage, poetry, and family testimonies without fear of surveillance. Rohingya refugees used it to create a multi-generational archive of their cultural heritage.
“Memory is not passive,” Taeidkashani told Foreign Policy in 2022. “It’s active resistance. To remember who we are, especially when the world is trying to erase us, is the most revolutionary act.”
NoorNet has since received awards from UNESCO and Amnesty International and was named one of TIME’s Top 100 Innovations in 2023.
Poetry in a Digital Age
While Taeidkashani’s technological work garners international acclaim, her literary output remains central to her identity. Her poetry is widely published and deeply respected for its lyric intensity and multilingual experimentation.
Her 2021 debut collection, “In the Code of My Mother’s Voice,” blends Farsi proverbs, code snippets, and free verse to explore what it means to inherit a language that was once forbidden. The collection was longlisted for the National Book Award and praised for “rewriting exile in real time.”
One of her most cited poems, “Protocol of the Displaced,” reads:
we were asked to compress / our grief into bytes
to encrypt our lullabies
to translate blood into metadata
they called it progress / we called it silence
In recent years, she has experimented with AI-generated poetry trained on refugee testimonies, creating hybrid forms that challenge the reader’s assumptions about authorship, authenticity, and voice.
A Reluctant Public Figure
Though she has been invited to speak at the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and tech summits around the globe, Taeidkashani keeps a low profile. She often turns down media interviews and avoids traditional social media platforms.
Those close to her say it’s not out of arrogance, but intentionality. “She believes visibility should serve the cause, not the ego,” says longtime collaborator and fellow activist Reza Vaziri. “She spends more time listening than speaking. That’s rare in our world.”
Still, when Taeidkashani does speak, people listen. Her 2023 TED Talk, “Who Remembers the Forgotten?”, was a haunting meditation on digital colonialism and the way global tech companies profit off marginalized stories. The talk garnered millions of views and sparked conversations about consent, data ethics, and the commodification of pain.
Cultural Strategy and Global Impact
Today, Aviva Taeidkashani serves as an advisor to multiple international human rights organizations, including Digital Rights Watch and the Internet Archive. She is leading efforts to build ethical frameworks for AI development in conflict zones and has helped draft policy recommendations for the European Parliament on digital sovereignty.
She is also working on a multimedia educational platform, Echo Atlas, which will combine VR, oral history, and real-time data visualization to teach young people about the history of forced migration.
Despite her growing influence, she remains grounded. She lives part-time in Barcelona and part-time in Istanbul, often working out of small cafés and libraries. She refuses full-time academic appointments and avoids corporate partnerships.
“I don’t want to institutionalize my voice,” she once said. “I want to keep it mobile, like our stories have always been.”
Looking Ahead
Now in her early 30s, Taeidkashani is currently working on her second book, “The Quiet Codes,” a hybrid memoir about her parents’ journey, the poetics of programming, and the ethics of remembering in digital times. The book is expected to be published in late 2025 and has already been acquired by a major publishing house.
She is also developing a new AI model—tentatively named GhazalNet—which aims to train natural language systems using poetic structures rather than binary logic. The project, she says, is not meant to create poetry, but to teach machines how to interpret emotion with more nuance.
“We’re teaching AI how to recognize pain,” she says. “Not just in metrics, but in metaphor.”
A Legacy of Connection
In a world that often forces people to choose between tradition and innovation, emotion and logic, East and West, Aviva Taeidkashani’s work refuses to choose. She insists that our most human qualities—storytelling, memory, connection—belong in the future we are building.
She once told a group of refugee students in Greece, “Don’t let anyone digitize your life without your permission. Your story is not data. It’s a flame.”
That flame, carefully tended through poetry, platforms, and presence, continues to light paths forward for those who—like her—live in the spaces between.