About

Kendra Kintzi, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on development, decarbonization, and digital media in Southwest Asia. Trained as an interdisciplinary social scientist, she draws on the tools of political economy, political ecology, and digital geography to explore the sociospatial dynamics of environmental and infrastructural change. 

Kendra’s work on smart development and digital mobilization has been published in The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, The Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Big Data and Society, Geography Directions, and New Mandala. Her work on the cultures and infrastructures of decarbonization is featured in Environment and Planning C, Antipode, Sustainability Science (here and here), and Environment and Planning D. She has also contributed to four edited volumes on Climate, Science, and Society; The Smartification of Everything; Gender, Power, and Politics; and Political Geography. Over the course of her graduate training, she also worked to apply the insights of critical theory to inform grounded research and advocacy efforts. She was the lead author of an in-depth research report on natural gas development in the Global South and continues to contribute to participatory action research focusing on gender and development. 

Kendra’s research was awarded grants from the Society of Woman Geographers, Fulbright-Hays (declined), Fulbright-IIE, ACOR-CAORC, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Cornell Qualitative and Interpretive Methods Institute, and the Cornell Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. She is a recipient of the Digital Geography Student Paper Award from the American Association of Geographers, the Taietz Graduate Student Paper Award in Development Sociology, and a Global Racial Justice Graduate Fellowship from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.       

Kendra brings over a decade of on-the-ground experience working in international development to her scholarship, teaching, and engagement. Her experience ranges from the grassroots to the bilateral level, including work with community-based environmental and refugee assistance centers in the Levant as well as the US Trade and Development Agency, Oxfam, and Amplify Girls. She speaks Arabic and French, and has conducted fieldwork in eleven countries across Southwest Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa.   

Kendra received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Development Sociology from Cornell University, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Atkinson Center for Sustainability at Cornell University from 2023-2025. She received her B.A. in Development Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where she first fell in love with francophone literature and cinema and worked in a neighborhood bookstore. Originally from the foggy hinterlands of Los Angeles, she is an avid biker, baker, and lover of tacos.