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.

Sarah Ciston is a computational media artist and experimental writer of prose, poetry and Python. Her projects include an AI interface that reprograms the inner critic, an interactive poem of the quantified self, and a chatbot that explains feminism to online misogynists. Published in Ada Journal, ZYZZYVA, Hobart, etc., she holds an MFA in Hybrid Writing from UC San Diego, is a graduate of USC’s Resident Honors Program as a Trustee Scholar, and has been named one of San Francisco Weekly's "Best Writers Without a Book.”

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.

As an artist who designs and tests structures for participation and dissent, Luke Fischbeck draws on a rich and varied experience in creative media—including filmmaking, music composition, visual art, writing, software design, and performance—to better understand the role listening plays in collective expression. Working across media and often collaboratively, he is a contributing member of the group lucky dragons, co-founder and principal organizer of Sumi Ink Club (a platform for collaborative art) and KCHUNG Radio (a cooperative broadcast project), and a director of the non-profit arts organization Human Resources. His recent book Beyond Majority Rule (Hesse Press, 2018) uses a range of visual and poetic strategies to explore how minimally-structured horizontal organizations make collective decisions. His work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA/PS1, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London's Institute for Contemporary Art, LACMA, MOCA, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the 54th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, and The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others.

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.

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.

Noa P. Kaplan is an artist, researcher, and educator based in Los Angeles. She analyzes and reconstructs overlooked, disappearing, and forgotten collections. Through virtual simulations, physical artifacts, and environments, she invites viewers to inhabit these collections, often at unfamiliar orders of magnitude. Noa has exhibited recent work at Siggraph, Ars Electronica, CODAME, Femmebit, and the Hammer Museum. She has participated in residencies and fellowships at IDEO, Autodesk, Electric Objects, and Eyeo and her work has been featured in Business Insider, Wired Magazine, Discovery VR, and the Huffington Post. Noa has taught as a Lecturer in the School of Arts and Architecture at UCLA since 2012 and is currently an Annenberg Fellow in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.