Zion Ariana Mengesha

Zion Ariana Mengesha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), affiliated with the College of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on linguistic anthropology, particularly the intersections of Black expressive practices, language ideologies, and sociopolitical structures. She examines African American gender performances, linguistic bias in education and AI, and the sociolinguistic implications of respectability politics among Black women in Sacramento, CA.

• Education: PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University (2024).

Her research interests include sociolinguistics, African American English, ethnography, and human-computer interaction. She previously served as a sociolinguistics subject matter expert on Google’s Responsible AI User Experience team.

Her work bridges linguistic ethnography with critical race theory, addressing systemic inequities in language technologies and educational systems. She advocates for community-based participatory research methodologies and has contributed to improving speech recognition systems’ fairness.