hi! i'm cynthia.

i'm a writer/artist/graduate worker who likes thinking about poetics, (programming) languages, play, craft, disability/sickness, pedagogy. you can find me on mastodon @cxli@scholar.social, and longer form writing on my blog.

you can browse the rest of my portfolio below:

published work

glimpse, in taper magazine #16: for good measure; code poem. phone compatible, desktop recommended. artist statement is viewable by inspecting code and looking in the artist statement is viewable by inspecting code and looking in the <head> tag, or here.
If Moby Dick Was a Woman, in agave magazine; poetry.

academia

i'm a PhD student at northeastern university, advised by chris martens. i'm also affiliated with SEALab with michael ann devito. my academic email is: li [dot] cynth [at] northeastern [dot] edu.

Is truth futureproof? On the possible futures of mechanized proofs. Chris Martens, Emma Tosch, Elan Semenova, Cynthia Li. In PLATEAU’26.
Privacy Policies on the Fediverse: A Case Study of Mastodon Instances. Emma Tosch, Luis Garcia, Cynthia Li, Chris Martens. In Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PoPETS) Issue 2024.4.
Translating Between Game Generators with Asterism and Ceptre. Cynthia Li, Joseph Osborn. In PCG Workshop’24 at FDG.
Asterism: Operational Logics as a Game Engine Engine. Joseph Osborn, Cynthia Li, Katiana Wieser. In PLIE’21 at AIIDE.

misc.

i cultivate a footnote garden of stuff that influences my work
i collect various fragments of my writing
i co-organized boston HTML day 2025 with my friend katherine!
i used to organize solstice school, a free interdisciplinary online conference for the fediverse (summers 2020-2024).
my undergrad thesis about code style, AESTHETICS OF CODE: exploring the ways we express ourselves computationally, and how writing code works with the restraints of the digital to create its own aesthetics.

contact

licynthia [dot] x [at] gmail [dot] com