Naana Obeng-Marnu

Naana Obeng-Marnu’s research dissects how mass media affects how we talk to and about each other. She employs computational and creative practices to trace the effects of media diets on interpersonal and political discourse.

Naana Obeng-Marnu is a first-year doctoral student at Annenberg. She is a writer, digital artist, and designer focused on unpacking how the stories told through both traditional and emerging media reflect our values and impact our ability to engage in productive dialogue. Her work leverages audio and linguistic conversation analysis to audit media systems and aims to develop principles and recommendations for civically minded content creators and policymakers.

She received her Masters in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab as an Amazon Robotics Day One Fellow. There, as a student of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, she studied visualization and interaction design as mediums of analysis and understanding of conversation dynamics. Her projects included a collaboration with WGBH Frontline examining the integration of their documentaries on youth-facilitated dialogue; visualizations for the Data Provenance Initiative, which hopes to further AI transparency; and the interactive spatial audio-visual exhibition Collective Echos featured at Ars Electronica 2023. Previously, as an Operations Associate at Meta, she built frameworks and automated processes to better support academic researchers, digital publishers, and creators.

Outside of her research, Naana volunteers as a beta reader and designer for Thriller authors. She also serves as Secretary of the Board of Directors for Brown Broadcasting Service where she works alongside industry leaders in new media to support and mentor Brown University students interested in media, design, and tech careers.