Genevieve Bell

Genevieve Bell (born 1967) AO FTSE FAHA FASSA is an Australian cultural anthropologist who served as the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University from 1 January 2024 until her resignation on 11 September 2025 sparked by staff and student outrage over large staff cuts in an attempted restructure. She is best known for her work at the intersection of cultural practice research and technological development (including as a pioneer in the field of futurist research), and for being an industry pioneer of the user experience field. Bell was the inaugural director of the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Innovation Institute (3Ai), which was co-founded by the Australian National University (ANU) and CSIRO’s Data61, and a Distinguished Professor of the ANU College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics. From 2021 to December 2023, she was the inaugural Director of the new ANU School of Cybernetics. She also holds the university's Florence Violet McKenzie Chair, and is the first SRI International Engelbart Distinguished Fellow. She is widely published, and holds 13 patents.

Daughter of renowned Australian anthropologist Diane Bell, Genevieve Bell was born in 1967 in Sydney and lived in Melbourne, Canberra, and in several Aboriginal Communities in the Northern Territory when she was a child. In 1990, Bell graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Philosophy in anthropology. She then attended Stanford University where she earned her master's degree and PhD in 1998, both in anthropology. Her doctoral research focused on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

From 1996 to 1998, Bell taught anthropology and Native American Studies at Stanford University.

In 1998, Bell was employed by the Intel Corporation to help build out their nascent social-science research competency in the advanced research and development labs. She was based at the company's Hillsboro, Oregon campus where she worked as a cultural anthropologist, studying how different cultures around the globe used technology. She and her colleagues helped reorient Intel to a more market-inspired and experience-driven approach, and she is widely credited with establishing "user experience" as a recognised competency at Intel.

Bell started Intel's first User Experience Group in 2005, as part of Intel's Digital Home Group. The company named her an Intel Fellow, their highest technical rank, in November 2008, for her work in the Digital Home Group. She rejoined the advanced research and development labs in 2010, when Intel made her the director of their new User Experience Research group. This group was Intel's first fully integrated user experience research and development group; they worked on questions of big data, smart transportation, next generation image technology and ideas about fear and wonder. Bell was made an Intel vice president in 2014 and senior fellow in 2016.

Bell has been recognised outside Intel. In 2010, she was named one of the Top 25 Women in Technology to Watch by AlwaysOn and as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. In 2012, Bell was inducted to the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame and in 2013, she was named Anita Borg’s Women of Vision in Leadership. In 2014, she was included in Elle Magazine's first list of influential women in technology and also included in a new exhibit at London's Design Museum profiling 25 women from around the world.

Bell was also a Thinker in Residence for South Australia from 2008 to 2010. Her visiting appointment was intended to help guide government policy surrounding a new national broadband initiative. Bell conducted ethnographic research and developed new innovative research methods to identify barriers to adoption and drivers around broadband uptake and her final report is available online.

After 18 years as Intel's resident anthropologist, Bell returned to Australia in 2017 as the first of five appointments under the ANU Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt's Entrepreneurial Fellows scheme. She is a distinguished professor at the ANU College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics. She is the university's inaugural appointee of the Florence Violet McKenzie Chair, named in honour of Australia's first female electrical engineer and lifelong proponent of technical education for women.