Zeynep is an artist and curator from Istanbul, Turkey. She studied film and interactive media at Emerson College, later getting her start at LACMA’s Art+Tech lab creating AR installations. She then worked at the Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier Exhibitions and is a graduate of UCLA’s Design Media Arts MFA program. She primarily works with archived photography, video, photogrammetry and immersive media. Her subjects revolve around identity, history, and loss of memory. She is in pursuit of exploring the role artists play in preserving memories to navigate the struggle and alienation that arise from changing social environments and shifting identities.

Emily Van Belleghem is an experience designer, artist, and engineer who specializes in virtual space interaction. Her research specifically focuses on human computer interaction in augmented and virtual reality as well as with artificially intelligent agents. In studying creative media in conjunction with human factors psychology, behavioral psychology, and forms of human expression, she aims to produce works that resonate and evoke emotion as well as simplify daily life and the creative process.

Emily is currently a doctoral student in the Media Arts + Practice division within the School of Cinematic Arts. Before joining USC, she completed both her Bachelor of Science (’17) and Master of Engineering (’18) degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her master’s thesis work, completed within the Object Based Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, is now patent pending for a Radial Automultiscopic Display; a novel augmented reality light field display of her own design and fabrication.

Emily’s work has touched a multitude of industries and companies including the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Walt Disney Imagineering. Most recently, she created digital worlds as an Augmented and Virtual Reality Experience Design Engineer at a startup named Magnopus. While at Magnopus she acted as Lead Design on numerous projects including Elixir, a virtual reality hand tracking application debuted on stage by Mark Zuckerberg at Oculus Connect 6 and on his personal Facebook and Instagram accounts. In addition to her engineering education, Emily is an accomplished oil painter and musician.

Dana Dal Bo is a detective of her own suspicions. She is an artist and researcher on multiple projects at the intersections of technology, art, and science. Dana is currently investigating sites of non-terrestrial colonization with a focus on; biotechnology, commercial space exploration, and the metaverse. Her work has been presented internationally at Art Basel, ISEA, Ars Electronica, The National Gallery of Tirana, among others.

Biayna Bogosian is an architect and interactive media designer focusing on creating digital and physical media experiences that incorporate environmental data in order to change the way we perceive and construct our cities.

Biayna is currently pursuing a PhD in Media Arts + Practice in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University (2010) and a Bachelor of Architecture from Woodbury University (2008). Since 2011, Biayna has taught architecture, computational design, digital fabrication and interactive media courses at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, USC School of Architecture, Woodbury University School of Architecture, and Tongji University College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She has also conducted number of design workshops in Armenia, Hungary, Spain and China.

Biayna is a founding partner of Los Angeles based studio Somewhere Something (www.somewheresomething.com/) which focuses on designing multi-scale urban interfaces.

Laura Cechanowicz is a researcher, a collector, and a designer. She works across mediums, including animation, film and virtual reality, production design, and sound design. Thematically and formally she explores identity, neuroscience, embodiment, and the ways people record and transcribe personal histories. Her experience includes fieldwork in the US, China, Colombia, and throughout Europe. During her iMAP PhD, from 2014-2016 she worked extensively with Alex McDowell, learning world building through practice and as McDowell’s iMAP Teaching Assistant.

Laura received her MFA in Animation from the University of Southern California; her MA in Film Studies from the University of Iowa; her BA with honors from the University of Michigan majoring in Film & Video, Psychology and German; and she began her PhD in Media Arts and Practice at USC in 2013. Her activities during her PhD have included co-producing the website InteractingWithAutism.com, directing two documentaries including an experimental narrative, production designing the feature film Caihong City and the short film "Perfect World," and sound designing the interactive game Miralab and Alex McDowell's 2014 Virtual Reality Leviathan Project. She is highly influenced not only by media and history, but also by neuroscience and psychology.

Chantal Eyong is a media producer, screenwriter, and doctoral candidate in the Media Arts + Practice program. Chantal's research interests include identity politics and representation within the African diaspora, intergenerational relationships, home as psychological and geographical constructs, surrealism, science fiction, cities, and folklore. As a filmmaker, Chantal has collaborated on documentaries and short films featured on PBS and national/international film festivals. The short documentary she co-produced, “Thailand Untapped,” received a regional Emmy nomination in 2013. Her screenplays have received placements in screenwriting competitions, including ScreenCraft and the Atlanta Film Screenplay Competition. Chantal is also a contributing writer for SAYASPORA, a platform for African women across the diaspora. In 2021, Chantal received her MFA in screenwriting at UC Riverside. In her free time, Chantal enjoys singing, reading webcomics, and (re)attempting to learn French and playing the guitar.

Juri Hwang is a sound and media artist. Her research focuses on questions of sound and the role of media in the formation of memory and mental images. Engaging in an analysis of the cultural shifts of media usage and technologies she investigates the relationship between means of representation and how we perceive and remember. Through the analysis of still images, moving images, stereoscopic 3D images and sound, her work develops a sensitivity toward the artifacts that media introduce into our perceptual relationship to our environment.

Juri has a BA in English and Communication from Hanguk University of Foreign Studies and an MFA in Film Production from the University of Southern California. She has been involved in several projects that explore narrative forms across a range of media platforms such as film, sound and interactive media. Her work includes the award winning project “Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles: 1920-1986”, “Three Winters in the Sun: Einstein in California” and “Venture to the Interior.” Her work has been shown in the United States, Germany, France and Korea. Juri's current projects comprise “Somatic Echo,” an immersive sonic experience exploring bone conducted sound, and she is investigating hearing and auditory brain stem implants and the power of sound for cognitive health.

Maisa Imamović (BiH/NL, 1994) is a writer, web designer/developer, and experimental educator. She critically studies the role of the single user and user behaviors generated by code. She codes to organize her thoughts, respond to political gems, and socialize. Text + Code are her main mediums. Since 2019, Maisa has written code in collaboration with artists, collectives, and cultural institutions including Hackers&Designers, Ali Eslami, Marlies van Hak, Merel Smit, VEIN Agency, CalArts, LASP (Gerrit Rietveld Academie) and was published in Real Review, NXS World, Metropolis M, Other Worlds, TAAK, Kajet, Simulacrum, Forum. Her first book entitled The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer was published by the Institute of Network Cultures in 2022. She is ⅓ of Rip Space—media arts project space in Los Angeles. In 2024, she obtained her MA degree in Aesthetics & Politics at the California Institute of the Arts and was kindly supported by Prins Bernhard CultuurFonds. In the academic year 2024-2025, she taught creative coding and the history of cyberfeminism as an adjunct professor at USC Media Arts + Practice, UCLA Design Media Arts, ArtCenter Interaction Design, CalArts Integrated Media. She is about to publish her second book entitled Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies with Set Margins.

Kumi Iman creates forms of digital media that exist as ways of bearing witness and "being with" others. She is deeply affected by black feminist and women of color writers, makers and thinkers engaging issues of identity, difference, and relationality, including Trinh T. Minh-ha, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Kumi's work endeavors to open up creative critical space to imagine and practice ethical ways of being with others in the world.

David Kelley is an artist working with photography, video, and installation. His recent projects draw attention to the effects of global capitalism, resource extraction, and shifting physical and political landscapes. Influenced by a range of visual traditions, Kelley draws upon elements of experimental documentary, ethnography, performance, and avant-garde cinema. By working at the intersection of these strategies, he encourages an understanding of his subjects that is simultaneously direct and speculative.

His work has been shown in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Fotofest Biennial, Houston. Other exhibitions include Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, The Bank in Shanghai, the de Cordova Biennial in Boston, BAK in Utrecht, MAAP space in Australia, and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok.

Kelley received a Master of Fine Art from the University of California, Irvine, and was a 2010 -11 resident at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He is currently based in Los Angeles, California, and is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at University of Southern California.

David Kelley (Born in Portland Oregon. Lives in Los Angeles California.)

Andrea Kim is a documentarian, media artist, and cultural theorist from Orange County, CA. She is the director of The (In)visble Organ(2021), a documentary film about cervical health and the creation of feminist biomedical tools. With a long standing interest in bridging art, science, and technology, Andrea draws from cybernetic traditions to research the virtuality of cognition, computation, and culture in sociological contexts. Creatively, she explores how virtual worlds can be designed in ways that center cultural memory and queer embodiment using multi-user XR platforms. Formerly, as a research assistant at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Andrea explored new documentary forms with a focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive storytelling, and incubated co-creative projects at the Co-Creation Studio. Additional affiliations include CultureHub Los Angeles, the Fulbright Association, the Seoul Institute of the Arts, MITxPro, and formerly, the MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, Duke Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, Duke Center for Documentary Studies, Duke Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies, and Duke Health Humanities Lab.

Ron Morrison [Elegant Collisions] is an interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher working across the fields of human geography, digital technology, and urbanism. Their practice works to investigate the generative ways in which the unassimilable refigures, complicates, and dissolves our understandings of race + geographic space as fixed and knowable. Focusing on boundaries, subjectivity, and protection I look for the ways that fissures and inconsistencies can allow for emergent moments to practice new spatial relationships and epistemologies. From these seemingly dissonant spaces we learn to rework and retune systems towards an increased potential for collaboration and action, from the quotidian to the phenomenological. With a strong background in community development and social advocacy, they believe that people should have full access to shaping their cities and communities and see design as a medium for creating knowledge and moving beyond paralysis in the face of complexity. From building open source platforms to upend the continued practice of solitary confinement to crafting community based archives to combat gentrification, their work investigates cartographies of slow violence, cybernetics, unassimilable data, and blackness.

They have been a collaborator with design teams that implemented projects in New Orleans, Ghana, Colombia, Ethiopia, New York, and Venice and have had work featured in AIA New York, the UN World Urban Forum, and the Tribeca Film Festival. Ron holds degrees in Psychology and Gender Studies, as well as a graduate degree in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons School of Design. They are currently an Annenburg PhD Fellow in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC in Los Angeles.

Lisa Müller-Trede is a filmmaker and performance artist interested in the performative dimension of virtuality and the virtual in the live event. Her work focuses on the body in its live, recorded and augmented state. Often combining various media in live film shoots or performative exhibitions, she explores the body's physical limits. This is a core catalyst for her engagement with the body, the camera, the means of the editing room and devices and software allowing for augmented reality. In a recent long-term research project, she juxtaposed physical and cinematographic techniques of cutting to develop a cross-media performative practice.

David de Rozas is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator based in Los Angeles. His practice inquires the politics of memory by looking at places, bodies, and materialities as sites implicitly or explicitly shaped by unfolding historical authority, regimes of truth, and institutions of power. David’s research seeks to contest a history of both cultural amnesia and physical violence via collective resistance and cultural restoration across the intermingled past-present-future.

De Rozas’ work has been presented at NY MoMA, Visions du Réel, FullFrame, Sheffield Doc/Fest, or Kassel DocFest among others.

Andy Rutkowski is a Visualization Librarian currently working at USC Libraries. He works with students, faculty, and community members to interpret, analyze, visualize, and tell stories with data. His research interests include exploring concepts of the archive, especially as they pertain to memory, loss, and trauma, and how space and place can be used to enrich our understanding of data. Prior to joining USC as a librarian, he studied and worked at New York University. He earned an MA from NYU’s Draper Program in Humanities and Social Thought, and another MA from a Transdisciplinary program focused on Trauma and Violence.

Michelle Salinas is a facilitator of stories, people, and art. She is a queer, Chicana, born and raised in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, California. She attended First St. Elementary, Hollenbeck Middle School, Roosevelt High School, UCLA, and now USC — a very LA educational journey and overall upbringing. Michelle graduated from UCLA with a B.A. and M.A. in Latin American Studies and Labor and Workplace Studies. Her Master’s project moved within historical, critical, and media analysis of songs about Mexican repatriation from the United States during the Great Depression. Today, she looks forward to exploring interactive ways of sharing and engaging with our histories while observing how this impacts our identity development, sense of purpose, communal and intergenerational processing — and how we imagine our futures. She is interested in researching, understanding, and translating through multi-disciplinary media and methodology, the differences in Latinx migration patterns, cultural exchanges within the U.S. and across Latin American borders, and psycho-social adaptations to life in the U.S. Ultimately, she wants to use media and art to document, sense-make, and inspire interconnectedness across people from various life paths. Michelle is also a Ronald E. McNair Scholar alumna, NPR Next Generation alumna, and a Posse Scholar. Finally, in her free time, she enjoys making iced matcha lattes, experiencing live music, and dancing to cumbia.

My research explores social, ecological and physical “sites of exchange” of Pacific coastlines through film, swimming, boating and love stories. I am interested in developing new vocabularies for considering mutual exchanges (hunting, eating, freediving, osmosis) that define contemporary relationships between subsistence cultures and wild places, especially in Southeast Alaska and Southern California. In the context of widespread ecological destruction, how can arts practice lead us towards a more enmeshed, reciprocal, loving relationship with the world? Can fiction, myth, or traditions help us to imagine and implement beautiful, blue, post-humanist futures? I use documentary films, poems, creative nonfiction and interactive installation to ask what different types of interfaces— romantic attachment, subsistence, cutting fish— can teach us about these landscapes of love and loss.

Dear Web Administrator,

Please include the bio below for PhD student Sultan Sharrief.
Thank you.

Sincerely,
Department Chair


Begin forwarded message:

From: Sultan Sharrief
Subject: Re: Bio and Image for MA+P website

Bio:

I am making Art . . .

Hi (___Department Chair__)

I've attempted a draft bio below, but I'm not sure what philosophy should be used for writing a bio for the iMAP website. How am I supposed to represent myself? I don't know if I'm prepared for the level of identity editing necessary to be concise. Like all the amazing folks in the department, I've done lots of random things and the notion of "relevance" seems too judgemental. I'm trying to be kind to myself as of late.

I deleted a whole paragraph about teaching media at a High School in Detroit and running a youth program for 10 years. But there's no quick way to explain all that. I had another version that started with "Sultan Sharrief is a Mad Scientist, but there is a method to his madness"...then went on to try to sum up the HIIPE Sufi Design methodology and dancing with holograms of my ancestors based on DNA results. But I thought maybe that was too out there (and ironically without much method to it). Maybe since technically we're in a School of Cinematic Arts I should maybe/ probably mention that I made several movies?? So I edited another to talk about some movie stuff, getting a BA in Film at U of Michigan, premiering my first feature at Sundance FF, getting a Masters at MIT in Comparative Media where I created my own LAb, a little about the Virtual Reality Data Visualization Musical I'm working on for my dissertation project. I ended it with a quirky line about founding the Michigan Ice Carving Team. People like when you do that, right?

Then it hit me that it could be interesting to make another one of my live email art pieces in the form of an email to a Department Chair about the best philosophy for writing a bio. Which breaks the fourth wall and includes the above sentences as the part of the bio. That one is my favorite, but again, not sure if it's too out there. :-) LMK.

Peace and Love,

Sultan

-------------------End Bio

Halo Starling (they/he) is a writer, director, performer, and artist, worldbuilding positive futures in the husk of the capitalist experiment. As a trans and queer immigrant with invisible disabilities, Starling's multi-hyphenate work in film, video, text, and performance explores what it means to be trapped inside of structures that are meant to help you. Starling envisions ways out by building worlds where marginalized people find more resources to fully thrive. Their work asks their viewers and readers to consider: how do we collectively find our way to a positive future?

Selwa Sweidan is an artist, designer and researcher of emerging technologies. Her work critically probes computational and technological epistemes through collaborative, embodied and improvisational methods. She has worked in Italy, Japan and the USA as a researcher across sectors, including future automated air traffic systems, smart home, and olfactory technology. Her work was published in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Journal and the Design Research Society. Selwa has co-curated media and computational art symposia and group exhibitions including Performative Computation, STACKED Expo, Super Radiance and Clustering She was a "Collective Resident" at NAVEL, a postgraduate Fellow at ArtCenter College of Design, an Interactive Design Fellow at Fabrica, and was awarded “Best Overall” at the Microsoft Design Expo ’15. Selwa holds a BA from Smith College, and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design. She is an Annenberg PhD Fellow in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC in Los Angeles.

However ambiguous the scope and parameters of my work and research is at times, it can only be said that a search must determine them; and it’s through searching—a feeling out of new epistemological forms—that work gets done. It’s a process that may approximate love more than it does any orthodox form of scholarly research. Projects begin by feeling-out the ledge of knowledge, then finding the means to leap off from it, thoughtfully. I try and extend to others what my projects offer to me: namely, alternative strategies for sense-making during times of existential crisis.

Recently, I’ve been speculating on the origins and future of the aural-warning-siren, and am now dedicated to the work of tracing its technical genealogy. However, it's becoming increasingly obvious that the device we call a siren is much more than merely a technological object ––it's simultaneously a way of resounding and listening to the world. Keeping this in mind, I’ve found it productive to veer away from the trail of conventional analysis, to begin speculating about the siren’s evolutionary morphology across deep-time, before it was invented by humans. In an attempt to contribute to what historian William Irwin Thompson calls the ‘resacralization of scholarship’, my sound works and research aim to come to terms with the role of myth in structuring our relationship to media technologies.

V. K. Tian is a games scholar and NSF Graduate Research Fellow whose current work lies at the intersection of uncomfortable interactions, pervasive gaming, and critical reflection, with attention to considerations of design ethics and player identity.

Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou is a multidisciplinary artist from Athens, Greece, based in Los Angeles, California. Their work spans video, installation, performance, and sculpture, forming experimental, immersive, interactive, and cinematic environments. Their world-body-building practice centers on themes of softness, deviance, kinship, affect, and community building as resistance tools for a queer transfeminist universe. They are inspired by sci-fi literature, speculative fiction, queer poetry, feminist cinema, creating radically fluffy hubs for unruly presents and hope-punk futures. Antigoni holds an MFA in Media Arts from UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture, and a BFA in Sculpture from the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece. They have received numerous scholarships and awards, including from the Fulbright Foundation, the Onassis Foundation, and the ARTWORKS Fellowship from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Their work has been exhibited at venues and showcased at festivals such as the Arnolfini Center of Contemporary Arts in Bristol (solo show), Honor Fraser Gallery in L.A., REDCAT Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin, WICKED Queer Film Festival, Thessaloniki TIFF, Wrightwood 651, Athens Biennale, Berlin Biennale, Thessaloniki Biennale, and the National Opera of Greece, among others. They have collaborated and worked with notable artists such as William Pope.L (document 14), Annie Sprinkle (document 14), Annea Lockwood and La Pocha Nostra.

Kai Wu creates interactive experiences at the intersection of architecture, technology, and art. He is interested in the daily rituals, movements, and experiences of the human body in time and space. He was trained as an architect but is incessantly curious about a broad range of mediums, materials, and disciplines. In a critical response to the radical technological reconstitution of culture, politics, and society into a new digital reality, his work proposes a timeless way of thinking about our virtual future in connection to the physical, the material, and the body. Wu received his Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Art degrees from Yale University. In 2021, his work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Goethe Institut. In 2022, his winning design for the Ecological Living Module was presented at the United Nations Environment Assembly. His work has also been featured at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery, Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, UPenn Annenberg School for Communication, and SIGCHI in 2024. Wu is currently developing a Digital Archeology project in Pompeii for Apple Vision Pro that explores memory in space and time.

Sichong Xie is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Her practice combines movement and material in body-based sculptural forms, including masks, costumes, and other objects. By placing traditional sculptural forms within new sites, materials, and social constructs, she investigates these forms and movements within global communities to re-consider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices. She raises questions about identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the surreal characteristics of her body in the ever-changing environment. Xie received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She was the recipient of the 2022 MAP Fund Award and the 2021 Artadia Los Angeles Award. Xie was a fellowship artist at MacDowell, Yaddo, The Studios at MASS MoCA, The Watermill Center, Bemis Center, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Xie’s works have been presented at USC Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles; Hauser & Wirth Somerset, UK; Wende Museum, Los Angeles; OCAT Art Museum, Xi’an, China; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin, Germany, among others.

Virginia Zangs is an architect, computational designer, and researcher investigating how socio-technical infrastructures of intelligence, from AI platforms to data networks, shape ecological, political, and cultural realities.

Virginia's practice spans cultural institutions, research labs, and design studios, combining theoretical research with computational and spatial design through installations, spatial data visualizations, and digital platforms. She is founding partner of the design studios interMediations and ZangsMichalove. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 “ Intelligens” and "City in the Cloud - Data on the Ground" at the Architektur Museum Munich (2025-2026). She has presented at symposiums, conferences, and hackathons, including the BlockchainGov International Symposium at Université Paris Panthéon-Assas, the AI & Cities - Digital Double Symposium in Rome organized by ETH, UZH, Digital Visual Studies Max Planck Society, and FCL Future Cities Laboratory (2024), and the Open Source AI Hackathon at Brown Institute, Columbia University (2024).

Virginia graduated from the MS in Computational Design Practices (CDP) program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University. Since 2022, she has been a licensed architect (ByAK - Bayerische Architektenkammer) with a Master's and Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Politecnico di Milano.

Virginia's professional experience includes positions at Wiel Arets Architects (WAA), Herzog & de Meuron (HdM), and OMA-AMO, as well as research collaborations with The Terraforming at Strelka Institute, ToftH - Transformation of the Human, and BlockchainGov + SOAM. She has worked with institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Architektur Museum at Technical University Munich (TUM), and the Center for Spatial Research (CSR) at Columbia University.

Faye is a visual artist and ethnographic filmmaker. Working in video, comics, and animation, her works often circumnavigate themes that arise from and intersect with China’s turbulent periods of social reform, from the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the country’s present day COVID-19 policies.

Faye previously earned a degree in Chinese Law and Society at Peking University as a Yenching Scholar (2019-2021). She trained in filmmaking and anthropological research methods at the Granada Center for Visual Anthropology in Manchester, U.K (2018-2019) whilst funded by a Fulbright Student Scholarship. Before that, she worked in Washington, D.C. at two museums: Smithsonian Folkways Recording, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Her undergraduate degree was completed at Harvard University.