Soraya Murray

Soraya Murray is an Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on contemporary visual culture, particularly film and video games, examining how these mediums reflect and shape societal fears, dreams, and struggles for recognition.

Her work includes the forthcoming book Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT Press, 2026), analyzing technothriller films from the 1970s to the present. She also authored On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018), which explores video games through a visual culture lens.

Murray is currently co-editing an anthology with Trea Andrea Russworm on antiracist futures in games and play. She actively engages in academic discourse through lectures, including a May 2025 UCSC Cultural Studies Colloquium talk on the presence of Black technology experts in technothriller films.