Rhea Kapur is a researcher, engineer, artist, and urban archivist with a B.A. in Linguistics and a B.S. in Computer Science (AI) from Stanford University, where she was advised by Dan Jurafsky. She is the founder of Cultural Fingerprints, a research-driven creative studio and interdisciplinary software lab building new ways to explore how language, culture, and place shape each other.

As part of the Stanford NLP Group, the Social Interaction Lab (Stanford), the Computation and Language for Society Lab (UCLA), and the EduNLP Lab (Stanford), Rhea researches how multimodal LLMs handle culture, accessibility, and contextual grounding. Previously, Rhea worked on mobile engineering at The New York Times (Games, Cooking, Newsreader) and built speech models and infrastructure at Gridspace, a startup creating AI voice agents for consumer and enterprise applications.

As an artist, Rhea photographed neon signage in San Francisco to understand how it defines each of the city’s districts, subsequently creating a neon sculpture of her own while working in Los Angeles (which has since shattered, but its tubes live on this website). Now, Rhea documents signs and symbols around the world as “cultural fingerprints,” archiving them using computational cartography and analyzing them using integrative practices from computer science, ethnography, linguistics, and semiotics. Cultural fingerprinting is a concept Rhea devised for how repeated local “stencils” emerge from cultural, regulatory, or sociopolitical factors to form, both through their pattern and their variations, the unique visual aesthetic of a place.

Rhea is on leave from her M.S. in Computer Science (Systems + AI) at Stanford to work on Cultural Fingerprints and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. If you see a choking sign in an NYC restaurant with a cool design, please reach out to her about it :)