NEW NATURE is bringing together leading climate scientists, artists, and creators from Canada, Germany, Mexico and the United States working on the forefront of immersive technologies to network, exchange knowledge, and to participate in conversations exploring the newest frontiers of our climate science, education, and immersion.
Fernanda Parente is a curator, concept developer, entrepreneur and lecturer in the fields of art, culture & technology. She is interested in the power of immersive content (VR, MR, XR) and in innovative ways to engage with audiences.
Fernanda has previously curated for the film and technology festival Digital Biscuit, re:publica Berlin and Dublin, Future Affairs, among others. In addition, Fernanda has moderated and presented at the News Impact Summit, Retune Festival and VRNOW Con.
She currently sits in the programme committees for #rp20 and Performing Arts Festival Berlin.
Nick Shapiro is a multidisciplinary environmental researcher that studies, and designs interventions into, issues of chemical contamination, climate change, and mass incarceration.
Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School in New York. Her current book project focuses on plastic and its links to petrocapitalism. She has lectured internationally, including at the MoMA, the National Gallery of Canada, MIT, Columbia University, Yinchuan Biennale, and Sonic Acts.
She has written about the intersection of art, politics and ecology for numerous art and academic publications. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017).
Dr. Mauro is the Executive Director of the Prairie Climate Centre (PCC) at the University of Winnipeg. He is an environmental scientist, geographer, and filmmaker as well as a former Canada Research Chair, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, and Apple Distinguished Educator. Mauro has served on expert panels related to food security, climate change and energy issues. He has also developed a trilogy of feature-length climate change films across Canada, including Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change (co-directed with acclaimed Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk) and Beyond Climate (produced and narrated by scientist and broadcaster Dr. David Suzuki).
With the PCC, Mauro also developed the Climate Atlas of Canada, which is an interactive platform that weaves climate science and storytelling to promote climate resilience and action across Canada. Mauro’s work has been featured in academic conferences, museums, film festivals and news media such as the United Nations, Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic, Royal Ontario Museum, ImagineNative, Berlin International Film Festival, The Globe and Mail and This American Life.
Dr. Yewande Pearse is a neuroscientist and science communicator. Her research interests in the lab focus on brain pathologies and their potential treatments, but her fascination with the brain is not limited to any one area of the field. She gained her Ph.D. from King’s College London and is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Lundquist Institute at Harbor-UCLA, in affiliation with UCLA.
Outside of the lab, Yewande hosts a music/science podcast on Dublab radio called ‘Sound Science’, has written for Massive Science and TEDMED and is a member of the Collective Residency at NAVEL Los Angeles, where she served on the 2019 Programming Committee and is a member of the Board of Directors.
Luisa Falcon is a biologist from Mexico´s National University, with Master in Sciences from the Marine Sciences Institute, UNAM and Université Aix Marseille, PhD from Stony Brook University. PI of the Bacterial Ecology Laboratory at the Institute of Ecology, UNAM since 2006. Invited professor to Kyoto University, Japan and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA.
She has specialized on microbial ecology of microbial mats, microbialites and biofilms in different aquatic environments including tropical, temperate and polar sites. Recently she has started to work with microbiome of wildlife. She is the author of several scientific publications including articles, chapters, and contributes to outreach initiatives.
Simon David Hirsbrunner is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Human-Centered Computing Research Group of Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the Geo.X research network.
He holds a PhD in media ethnography (University of Siegen), a Masters in European Media Studies (University of Potsdam), and a Masters in International Relations (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies). In his research, he is investigating the mobilization and popularization of climate impact scenarios through digital data, technologies and platforms. Some insights of his scientific work are gathered in his upcoming book 'A New Science for Future: Climate Impact Research and the Quest for Digital Openness'.
Tamiko Thiel was awarded the 2018 Visionary Pioneer Award by the Society for Art and Technology Montreal for over 30 years of media artworks exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity in political and socially critical artworks. She was lead product designer on the "Connection Machine CM1/CM2“ AI supercomputer, in 1989 the fastest computer on earth and now in the collection of MoMA NY. She began working with virtual reality in 1994 as producer and creative director of "Starbright World" (1994-‘97), in collaboration with Steven Spielberg. Her first VR art installation "Beyond Manzanar" (2000) is in the collection of the San Jose Museum of Art; she created her most recent VR artwork "Land of Cloud" in 2017 as a GoogleVR artist in residence, and in 2018 it won the Audience Award at the VRHAM VR Festival in Hamburg, Germany. Her first augmented reality artwork "ARt Critic Face Matrix" was part of the path-breaking AR intervention into MoMA NY in 2010, after which she organized an AR intervention into the Venice Biennial in 2011. Her AR commissions since then include "Unexpected Growth" for the Whitney Museum, now in the permanent collection.
Luftwerk is the Chicago-based artist collaborative of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero. Their practice centers on an exploration of light, color, and perception in immersive, experience-based installations and sculpture. The name Luftwerk embodies their shared vision of work that is “light” or “ephemeral.” Since its founding in 2007, Luftwerk’s work has been featured at the Denver Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, MASS MoCA and at significant architectural sites such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Fallingwater” and Mies van der Rohe’s “Barcelona Pavilion”.
Petra Bachmaier holds an MA from the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, Germany and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
Sean Gallero, originally from the Bronx, studied art and humanities at Lehman College - City University of New York. He continued at SAIC in visual communications, art and technology, and performance.
Andrea Polli is an environmental artist working at the intersection of art, science and technology. Her interdisciplinary research has been presented as public artworks, media installations, community projects, performances, broadcasts, mobile and geolocative media, publications, and through the curation and organization of public exhibitions and events.
She creates artworks designed to raise awareness of environmental issues. Often these works express scientific data obtained through her collaborations with scientists and engineers and have taken the form of sound art, vehicle-based works, public light works, mobile media experiences, and bio-art and design. Polli holds an MFA in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in practice-led research from the University of Plymouth in the UK.
Sara Lisa Vogl is a futurist, collaboratively exploring and constructing new virtual and augmented realities to inspire, unite and enrich humanity.
A background in design, communication arts & interactive media and in love with the idea of new worlds, Sara is on a mission to go beyond the status quo of what immersive virtual realities are and explore their diverse potentials for the future. Besides developing and directing XR experiences Sara is curating long-term VR trips and guiding people on these trips as the worlds first VR Shaman. Driven by the quest to create deep immersion in her experiences the berlin based futurist is exploring new interaction concepts like the innovative hand-locomotion-method in her experience Lucid Trips as well as experimental ways of storytelling. By creating immersive installations Sara is working with sensors, haptics and the intersection between algorithms and real worlds.
Aljumaine Gayle is a queer Interdisciplinary creative technologist working at the intersections of technology, art, design and data justice. Currently enrolled in OCADU’s Digital Futures program and actively co-organizes/ co-designs programming on behalf of IntersectTO.
Aljumaine’s artwork work explores the notions of othering of blackness in contemporary life and aims to subvert this othering through Afrofuturism and artistic use of technology. His interactive digital art challenges tokenism and trauma narratives that characterize the majority of mainstream black art, film and music.
Tega Brain is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data systems and infrastructure. She has created wireless networks that respond to natural phenomena, systems for obfuscating fitness data, and an online smell-based dating service.
She has recently exhibited at the Guangzhou Triennial, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the New Museum, NYC and the Science Gallery in Dublin. Her work has been widely discussed in the press including in the New York Times, Art in America, The Atlantic, NPR, Al Jazeera and The Guardian and in art and technology blogs like the Creators Project and Creative Applications. She has given talks and workshops at museums and festivals like EYEO, TedxSydney and the Sonar Festival.
Tega is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media, New York University. She works with the Processing Foundation on the Learning to Teach conference series and p5js project. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Data & Society, Eyebeam, GASP Public Art Park, the Environmental Health Clinic and the Australia Council for the Arts.
Tosca is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art and ecology.
Through developing bodies of work incorporating metal, glass, and electronics, Tosca received scholarships from The Corning Museum of Glass, Pilchuck Glass School and The Penland School of Crafts. Her work has been featured at SOFA New York, Culture Canada, Metalsmith Magazine, The Toronto Design Exchange, the Memphis Metal Museum, Urban Glass Brooklyn, Music Works Magazine, and Vector Festival.
Tosca has been awarded artist residencies with Nes, Skagaströnd, The Ayatana Research Program in Ottawa and The Icelandic Visual Artists Association through Sím, Reykjavik Iceland. In 2019 Tosca was one of the first Bio-Artists in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto in partnership with the Ontario Science Centre, as well as a recipient of the 2019 BigCi Environmental Award at Wollemi National Park within the UNESCO World Heritage site in the Greater Blue Mountains to further explore her work in bio-sonification of fungi and trees with local mycologists and botanists throughout Wollemi, the Sydney Botanical Gardens, and with Māori rangers concerned with Kauri dieback at the Arataki Visitor Centre, New Zealand.
Julian Bonequi (Mexico 1974). Hybrid Artist and Transmedia Producer working with Sonic Immersion and Extended Narratives. As founder of Audition Records [Berlin-Mexico], Bonequi has published an important experimental art collection with more than 120 international releases and produced series as guest curator in collaboration of Salon Bruit Berlin, Akouphène Festival of Geneva, Ex Teresa Arte Actual Museum and CCDRadio at the Center of Digital Culture in Mexico.
As professor has taught New Media Art in Mexico and Masters-level digital animation courses at the Pompeu Fabra University and the Polytechnic University of Valencia, as well as workshops of 3D Sonification and Virtual Reality at the Mexican Center for Music and Sonic Arts. As a senior 3D art generalist has collaborated in research groups about interactive technologies and neuroscience for educational exhibitions and games.
As musician Bonequi has performed extensively with orchestras and ensembles in London, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona and Istanbul. Winner of the CTM Radio Lab Berlin 2017 with the sci-fi Radio Drama “The Death of The Anthropocene”; Support Program for Production and Research in Art and Media 2016 for the piece “Antagony. VR Chamber Opera”. Bonequi currently works on ˈʊmˌvɛltn̩, an interactive composition commissioned by the Konzerthaus Berlin and developing mixed reality interfaces for his Holophrenic Theater project as Member of theNational System of Art Creators FONCA.
Ladan Mohamed Siad is a Toronto and New York-based interdisciplinary, designer, creative technologist and researcher, who is exploring the relationships between design, technology and the universalities of black diasporic experience.
Alfredo Salazar-Caro is creator living/working between Mexico City, NYC, and Online. His works is an amalgamation of portraiture, installation/sculpture, documentary, video and VR/AR
Salazar-Caro is co-creator and creative director of DiMoDA, The Digital Museum of Digital Art. DiMoDA is a groundbreaking project that functions as a VR institution and exhibition platform dedicated to the development of XR Art.
His work has been exhibited internationally. Exhibitions include : Tribeca Film Festival, Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum, The Wrong Biennale in São Paulo, Brazil, New Normal Beirut/Istanbul, Die Ungerahmte Welt, HeK, Basel Switzerland, Siggraph Asia, Bangkok, Thailand and 1Mes1Artista Mexico City among others. His work can be seen in publications such as Leonardo, Cultured Magazine, Vice Magazine and Creators Project.
Phil Max Schöll is a Berlin-based motion designer and video artist.
He was born in Munich in ‘82 and studied design in Konstanz. In 2009, he founded his studio Weltraumgrafik, which produces and concepts vector-based motion graphics, often presented in connection with projection or lightsetups as artistic audiovisual room-installations at events or in the urban space. The aim is to find unconventional approaches in design and new forms of beauty in motion graphics.
Allison Moore is a new media artist working in expanded cinema and based in Montréal. Currently an MFA candidate in Film Production at Concordia University, she is advancing research in immersive media and VR as a member at Milieux, TAG and the Post Image cluster. For the past 14 years, she has crafted an independent practice participating in residencies, workshops, and exhibitions internationally.
Her work has been programmed at Tokyo Arts and Space (Japan), ISEA 2015, OBORO (Montreal), Traverse Video (France), Museu de Arte de Belem (Brazil), Festival of Nouveau Cinéma (Montréal), FIFA Experimental (Montréal), MAPP Festival and MUTEK Montreal. Her series of multi-screen video panoramas depict improbable landscapes referencing scenic dioramas. Her work Wunderkammer, a 35-screen video wall can be seen in Place-Des-Arts (Québec). She is currently in production with a new media public art work for The Grand Théâtre de Québec and developing projects in VR.
Moore works as a freelance editor, compositor and animator as well as teaching workshops in New Media practices.
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Kite’s scholarship and practice highlights contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance.
Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fibre sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. For the inaugural 2019 Toronto Art Biennial, Kite, with Althea Thauberger, produced an installation, Call to Arms, which features audio and video recordings of their rehearsals with Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS) York, which also consisted of a live performance with the conch shell sextet, who played the four musical scores composed by Kite.
Kite has also published extensively in several journals and magazines, including in The Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), where the award winning article, “Making Kin with Machines,” co-authored with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis, was featured. Currently, she is a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar.
Javier Soto Morras is an Interaction Designer and co-founder of NEEEU GmbH. His work at Neeeu focuses on humanising technology and finding affordances for abstract concepts.
Formed in the Royal College of Art and with a background in engineering, Javier’s practise in design has received recognitions such as the European Youth Award, and his work has been exhibited in places such as the MoMA in New York, Design Museum in London or the Design Museum of Seoul.
At NEEEU, Javier works across a range of industries, including Health, Culture and Development, helping companies to explore and create products and services in the intersection between new technologies and real people's needs, hopes and desires.
Johannes Helberger creates spatial music- and sound-experiences for installations, stage performances, exhibitions and interactive environments shown and performed internationally. The transformation of acoustic spaces and the play with perception of spectators, have become his signature as a spatial sound artist.
He is a co-founder of kling klang klong, studio for sound, music and acoustic narratives based in Berlin. The versatile team develops acoustic scenographies in the intersection of science, art and communication. Whether in real spaces or virtual environments, the studio treats the visitor as an active participant in interplay with organic sound environments.
Felipe's career in sound design saw him create sound worlds across multiple film genres, including commercials for over thirteen different car brands. Today, in his work in innovative multichannel, VR and 3D audio experiences, scientific research into sound, and product acoustics, Felipe strives to bring creative coding and affect-driven design to emerging technologies. This goal drove Felipe's efforts as one of the first sound designers to confront the challenges of eMobility and its silent vehicles, working in close cooperation with experts from Audi, Porsche and Volkswagen among others.
In recent years, Felipe's research practice has expanded beyond eMobility to explore the future of the wider urban soundscape. He is currently investigating critical and cultural questions about the ethical dimensions of sound in future spaces.
Winslow Porter is a Brooklyn based director, producer and creative technologist specializing in virtual/augmented reality and large-scale immersive installations. Shortly after graduating from NYU Tisch's ITP program, he produced the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival Transmedia Award-winning documentary CLOUDS, among other acclaimed new media projects.
Winslow formed studio the New Reality Company with Milica Zec in 2016, creating the critically acclaimed cinematic VR experiences Giant and Tree. They were both named designers in residence at A/D/O; the two were selected to Adweek’s Top 100 creatives as digital innovators. In 2018, Tree won the Lumiere award for Best Location Based VR Short at Warner Brothers Studios in Los Angeles, the Most Innovative Award at Games For Change, two Telly Gold Awards for Use of VR and Social Responsibility in Branded Content, and the Webby People’s Voice Award for VR.
Winslow is a current Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China (2018) Davos, Switzerland (2019 and 2020). He currently is an artist in residence at R/GA in NYC and is also a NEW INC Mentor.
Anna Mauersberger (1982) is an Emotional Designer, Creative Producer and Educational Innovator working at the intersection of personal growth, arts, technology and social activism. In 2018, she co-founded the educational organization HeartWire, aiming at innovating the way we teach and learn about the world. HeartWire designs collective-subjective-experiences and social interactions for teenagers and adults that do not only address their heads, but also their emotions, bodies and souls; HeartWire formats vary from immersive theatre plays to VR rituals to modern multi-day-Vision Quests in nature.
Anna was born and raised in Madrid and Bonn and studied political sciences in Bayreuth, Lille and Grenoble. She started out her career working for the German film and television production company UFA (5 years), where she led and instigated the award winning educational initiative DHDM (today: Mesh Collective), doing pioneer work in the field of digital, extracurricular youth education. Anna trained as Coach in Chile and Peru in 2015 and has ever since continued her education in the realms of Personal Growth: She's a certified Mentaltrainer and Energetic Healer as well as a soon-to-be Wilderness Trainer and Somatic Experience Practitioner. After almost 10 years of living in Berlin, Anna recently moved to the German countryside, where she lives with her partner and co-founder Anselm and, sometimes, his four kids, too. She fluently speaks German, French, Spanish and English.
Anna Moll was born in Rostock in 1988, studied television production and journalism at the University of Westminster in London. Before starting her own agency and production company “Molle&Korn”, she worked at the ARD Auslandsstudio London, in productions for the BBC and at UFA LAB Berlin.
Anna specializes in the development and implementation of socially relevant digital formats, transmedia productions and cinematic online shorts such as “A Message from the Future” (EVZ foundation), the political YouTube campaign #YouGeHa or the cross-media ARTE documentary “Follow Me “ and the web series "I Follow" on Arab video bloggers and their communities in Syria, Egypt, Dubai and Saudi Arabia. In 2020, Anna released her documentary web series “Calling Home” (ARTE) in which parents and their grown-up children have a telephone conversation on societal issue that they have different opinions on.
With her company “Molle&Korn” she also writes, produces and directs online commercials and campaigns for NGOs, foundations and brands that she likes. Currently, Anna is developing a series of online short films that aim to appeal to individuals of opponent political ideologies and create a healthy discussion between them. This series is a co-production between the National Filmboard of Canada and Turbulent (Montreal).
Annas work has won awards such as the European Media Prize for integration (CIVIS) and an ADC Award (film). She has also been nominated various times for the Grimme Online Award and the Grimme Prize in Germany.
Elena is a Mexican film producer, cultural promoter, and activist. She has been working in the documentary film industry for over 15 years. She is the co-founder, along with Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, and Pablo Cruz, of Ambulante, and served as its director from 2005-2015.
Ambulante’s multiple programs include Latin America’s largest touring documentary film festival, a training program for underserved communities in Mexico, and an editorial division. The organization has received prestigious awards and grants, including the Prince Claus Award (2019), and the WOLA HUman Rights Award in recognition of its track record promoting documentaries as a tool for change.
In 2017, Fortes co-founded, along with award-winning producer and Flaherty fellow Daniela Alatorre the Mexico City-based production company No Ficción. With the company, she has produced 10 films in the past three years including Midnight Family (d. Luke Lorentzen), shortlisted for the 2020 Academy Awards, and Vivos (d. Ai WeiWei) which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Fortes has participated in juries and programming committees for various film festivals and organization, among them Camerimage, Sundance, CPHDOX, Hot Docs, and the Guadalajara International Film Festival. She is also an accomplished designer and received her B.A. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003.
Mexican producer and filmmaker. She holds an MFA in documentary film from the School of Visual Arts in NY. She has been part of the Sundance Editing, Music and Creative Producing Labs, and a Flaherty Film Seminar fellow and participant for several years. She produced the Morelia International Film Festival and was the head of the Documentary Programming Committee for ten years. Daniela is the producer of 2009 Sundance Award winning documentary El General, directed by Natalia Almada); ¡De Panzazo! directed by Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Loret de Mola); El Ingeniero directed by Alejandro Lubezki; and the NYT OpDocs Unsilenced, directed by Betzabé García.
In 2017, she founded No Ficción along with Elena Fortes and Cinépolis. Her producer credits with No Ficción include a series of documentary shorts for Netflix (A Tale of Two Kitchens, directed by Trisha Ziff; A Three Minute Hug, directed by Everardo González; Birders directed by Otilia Portillo; Lorena,Light Footed Woman, directed by Juan Carlos Rulfo; and After the Raid, directed by Rodrigo Reyes), an op-doc for the New York Times (Ruptured City, directed by Diego Rabasa and Santiago Arau), the feature documentary Midnight Family, directed by Luke Lorentzen, which premiered at Sundance where it obtained the jury award for best Cinematography in the US Documentary Competition, and Vivos a feature documentary directed by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Retiro is her first feature documentary as a director. It premiered at the 2019 Morelia Film Festival where it obtained a Special Jury mention.
Julian Adenauer studied mechatronics engineering, but began building bridges from technology to design and art while still a student. As part of the artist duo Sonice Development, he developed robotic art installations and exhibited them internationally. Within the interdisciplinary graduate college prometei he did research in the field of human-technology interaction in product development.
As founder and director of Retune, since 2012 he curates and organizes interdisciplinary festivals, events and workshops. Since 2018 he is also a guest professor for Digital and Interactive Technologies at the Weißensee School of Art Berlin.
Nadia Oertelt is a co-founder of Massive and the Chief Content Officer at Science Friday. Massive is a science media company that aims to engage the public and scientists in new ways. I am a former research scientist, and I currently work as a media producer and documentary filmmaker. I like to bring art into quantitative spaces. Previously I worked as a senior producer at Mashable and was once a science producer at Buzzfeed and Vice. I worked at HarvardX for almost four years producing The Fundamentals of Neuroscience. I graduated from MIT in 2007 with a BS in Neuroscience. I worked in labs at MIT, Harvard and Cambridge University and I lived for many years in London. I'm now based in NYC.
Silke is head of the still rather new XR HUB Bavaria / Munich at Medien.Bayern GmbH. Before she worked at the Bavarian State Ministry for Digital Affairs in the field of ""Audiovisual Media - Film, Games and XR"", and before that at the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Foreign Trade Department.
Her focus there was on the management of economic relations of Bavarian companies to the USA and Canada (in particular to Québec as Bavaria's partner region) with a wide range of topics from media, digital and creative industries, energy and medicine to mobility and aerospace. She gained first-hand industrial experience and worked as National Expert at the European Commission. She began her career in the Bavarian Ministry of the Environment working on water, air and chemicals.
Sonia Shechet Epstein works at the intersection of science and visual culture. She is Executive Editor and Associate Curator of Science and Film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. Sonia produces all content for the Museum’s online publication scienceandfilm.org and manages activities related to science and film at the Museum.
She curates the ongoing film series “Science on Screen” which pairs screenings of rarely-seen films with conversations between scientists and filmmakers that offer new perspectives on both film and scientific subject matter. Sonia has lectured internationally about the intersection of science and film.
Prior her position at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sonia was a Senior Program Associate at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation evaluating proposals for a multi-platform arts program to enhance public understanding of science. Prior to that, she worked for Nobel Laureate neuroscientist Dr. Eric R. Kandel at Columbia University preparing his book The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present, and helping to produce The Brain Series for PBS. She is a founding mentor at the New Museum’s organization NEW INC for practitioners working with art, technology, and design. Sonia is currently a Master’s candidate in Experimental Humanities at NYU. She is the recipient of the Dean’s Fellowship for Distinguished Master’s Students.
Elizabeth Miller is a documentary maker and professor at Concordia University who uses collaboration and interactivity as a way to connect personal stories to larger social concerns. Her multi-platform projects on timely issues such as water privatization, refugee rights, gender and environmental justice have won awards and influenced decision makers. Her work has been broadcast on international television, streamed on Netflix and featured in galleries, climate conferences and at festivals, including Hot Docs and SXSX.edu.
Miller is a Full Professor in Communications Studies at Concordia University in Montreal and her book “Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice” (2017) and articles including “Choreographies of Collaboration: Social Engagement in Interactive Documentaries” (2016) have been integrated into educational curricula. She has partnered with organizations including UNESCO, International Association with Women and Radio and Television, Witness and Wapikoni on human rights, new media and advocacy training.
Jasmin Grimm is a programme developer for international cultural projects and co-founder of Rosy DX – a studio for digitality. With a background in “Communication in Social and Economic contexts” (M.A., University of the Arts Berlin) she develops concepts for exhibitions, festivals, conferences and workshops at the intersection of art, society and technology.
Dr. Jill Didur is Associate Dean and Professor of English & Postcolonial Environmental Humanities at Concordia University, Montreal, and a member of the Technoculture Art and Games Research Centre at Milieux Institute for Art, Culture and Technology.
She is the co-editor of Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (Routledge 2015) and author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (UTP 2006). She has published on the significance of locative media, colonial botanical exploration, and imperial and postcolonial garden writing, as well as literary subversions of landscape practice in colonial and postcolonial India. She is the creator of the mobile app, the Alpine Garden MisGuide / Jardin Alpin Autremont (iTunes Apple Store 2015) which was installed at the Jardin botanique de Montréal in May 2015. She is currently developing a locative experience reflecting on settler environmentalism and the Anthropocene, Global Urban Wilds, for installation in Montreal's Champs des Possibles. She holds a SSHRC Insight Grant, Greening Narrative: Locative Media and Globalized Environments (2014-2022), and she is completing a book about imperialism, gardening, and the environment in postcolonial literature. She serves on the editorial boards for ARIEL, Postcolonial Text, and the management committee of Environmental Humanities.
Marie-Pier Gauthier is a producer at the NFB’s Montreal Interactive Studio and has been contributing to this rich narrative laboratory for the past eight years. Whether it’s digital creation on mobile phones or on the web, interactive installations or virtual or augmented reality projects, she supervises the execution of projects by innovative creators working at the crossroads of different disciplines. She produces projects using a range of storytelling tools, including social networks, code, design, artificial intelligence, and conversational robots. With degrees in journalism and interactive production, Marie-Pier has collaborated on more than 100 interactive works (including The Enemy, Do Not Track, and Way to Go) which have received more than 100 awards in Canada and abroad.
NFB producer, Louis-Richard Tremblay works on projects that combine editorial content, cutting-edge design, technologies and social platforms, where interactivity supports the creation of experiential and narrative universes exploring phenomena that transform individuals and society. After studying political science and making a brief foray into architecture, he developed a passion for radio in the early days of the Internet. In 2001, he joined the multimedia, cross-platform website, radio and TV show Bande à part, where he directed several teams of digital creators and journalists for Société Radio-Canada. He produced over a hundred works that won numerous awards on the local and international stage. At the NFB since 2013, he has worked mostly on international co-production. His most recent work concerns our connected and tech-infused society, played out in portable experiences and immersive environments. He mentored countless creators and producers on projects large and small and regularly gives conferences and master class in Universities and Festivals. He is driven by the thrill of working with teams of creators who join forces to push the limits of their craft.
A driving force in communications, Myriam Achard has more than 20 years of experience in public relations and press relations.
For the past 14 years, she has worked with Phoebe Greenberg to develop and promote the Canadian and international avant-garde arts scene. She has been Chief, New Media Partnerships & PR at PHI since it opened in 2012, and is Director of Communications for the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art.
Over the past years she has devoted a great deal of her energy to representing PHI internationally, and has thus created an extraordinary distribution network for projects (VR, immersive, interactive, XR, etc.) on which PHI takes part today as a co-producer, as well as a distributor. Phi saw its creative impulsion gain international recognition on three continents, from New York to Venice and Tokyo.
Samara is a documentary filmmaker, programmer, and scholar. She has programmed films and conferences for HotDocs in Toronto, the Berlin Biennale, the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM), the Points North Institute, and the Camden International Film Festival (CIFF), as well as for the Goethe-Institut (VR:RV 2018, New Nature 2020).
Samara’s debut feature documentary, 1999, premiered in 2018 at Visions du réel, and has since played over 30 festivals and institutions worldwide including HotDocs, DokuFest Kosovo, BAFICI, and the Museum of the Moving Image.
Samara has a MA from the Freie Universitaet Berlin, and a PhD in Cultural Studies from the Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil), the Universita degli Studi di Bergamo (Italy), and Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle (France).
