Presenters

Mika Satomi is a designer and an artist working in the field of e-Textiles, Interaction Design and Physical Computing. Her work explores how we relate with technology and what we really want in them. Read More

Andria Zafirakou, a teacher at Alperton Community School in Brent, won $1 million when she was crowned the best teacher in the world. Andria was born in north-west London to Greek-Cypriot parents and state-educated in Brent and Camden. She is an art and textiles teacher in Brent on the outskirts of London, one of the world’s most ethnically diverse places. Read More

Ryan Corrigan is a Laboratory Instructional Assistant in the engineering division at Lorain County Community College, where he primarily works inside of the amazing Fab Lab (digital fabrication lab). Read More

Hannah Kye, Ed.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Inclusive Education at Rowan University. She teaches courses on math, science, and issues of equity in early childhood education. Read More

Dr. Nettrice Gaskins’ work explores how to generate art using algorithms in different ways, especially through coding. She also teaches, writes, “fabs” or makes, and does other things. She has taught multimedia, computational media, visual art, and even Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles. Read More

Kirsty Robertson is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies at Western University, Canada (London, Ontario). Robertson has published widely on activism, visual culture and museums, culminating in her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Museums, Culture (McGill-Queen’s University Press, May 2019). Read More

Jie Qi is a multi-disciplinary designer, inventor and entrepreneur. Currently Jie is project assistant professor in the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo and a cofounder of Chibitronics, a company that produces creative learning toolkits. Her mission is to combine art with engineering to empower creators of all backgrounds to make their own expressive and personally meaningful technologies. Read More

Matt Ratto is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and the Bell University Labs Chair in Human-Computer Interaction. His work explores the intersections between digital technologies and the human life world, with a particular focus on new developments that trouble the divide between online and offline modes of production. Read More

Hannah Perner-Wilson likes making things. Documenting and sharing how she makes things is her means of storytelling other ways of making technology. She enjoys making electronic things that are less about efficiency and more about having fun. Playing with other humans and other soft materials in this process are important to her.

Ali Momeni was born in Isfahan (Iran) and emigrated to the United States at the age of twelve. He studied physics and music at Swarthmore College and completed his doctoral degree in music composition, improvisation and performance with computers from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley. Read More

Kylie Peppler is a learning scientist interested in how people learn in real-world contexts. Peppler’s current research is on electronic textiles and the relationship between traditional female crafts and STEAM learning outcomes. Read More

Travis Johns is a sound artist residing in Ithaca, NY, whose work includes performance, installation and printmaking, often incorporating eco/bio-based themes and electronic instruments of his own design. Read More

Paulina Velázquez Solís (b.México/Costa Rica, 1981) lives and works in Ithaca, New York. Paulina Velázquez is a visual artist working with diverse media such as installation, sculpture, drawing, animation, and media performance. Read More

Kim Karshner is an English Professor at Lorain County Community College. She teaches Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Creative Writing, and Technical Writing. Her research interests include trauma writing, and how writing and storytelling can be used as part of the healing process when dealing with traumatic events and abuse. Read More

Pamela H. Smith is Seth Low professor of history at Columbia University, and founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and of its cluster project The Making and Knowing Project (www.makingandknowing.org). Her articles and books examine craft and practice, and their relationship to scientific knowledge. Read More

Christiana Rose is an interdisciplinary artist who blends the disciplines of sound, circus arts, film, dance, theater, and interactive technology. Rose’s work is often collaborative and specializes in improvisation. Through her work she seeks to critique and inspire dialogue, introspection, and action into our behaviors and interactions with digital technologies and nature. Read More

Sam Topley is a sound artist and educator from Leicester (England, UK). She works with textiles to create handmade electronic musical instruments and interactive sound art work. Her work includes giant pompom musical instruments, knitted or ‘yarnbombed’ loudspeakers, and electronic musical instruments with e-textile interfaces. Read More

Taylor Levy is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, educator and one-half the design studio CW&T. Taylor has a penchant for taking things apart, understanding how they work, and putting them back together as a way to expose their inner workings and uncover nuances of human expression. Read More

Afroditi Psarra (GR/US) is a transdisciplinary artist and an Assistant Professor of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the art and science interaction with a critical discourse in the creation of artifacts. Read More

Patricia Cadavid is an immigrant, artist, and researcher, born in Colombia. In her work, she looks at the relationships and effects of coloniality in new media from the migratory experience and decolonial & anticolonial thinking. Read More

Al Evangelista is a performer, choreographer, and educator. His creative works have been performed at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, American Theatre Company, Links Hall, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, and Moss Arts Center. Evangelista’s work focuses on community-engaged practices, queer performance, social justice and Filipina/o/x-American diaspora. Read More

Jody L. Kerchner specializes in secondary school music and choral music education. She was awarded the Oberlin College Excellence in Teaching Award in 2011. She is founder and conductor of Oberlin Music at Grafton, a prison choir at the Grafton Correctional Institution. Read More

Lea Albaugh is a PhD student who works with the DevLab, Morphing Matter Lab, and Textiles Lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Lea’s research seeks to broaden both the technical and the expressive range of digital fabrication, particularly with textile materials and processes, through antidisciplinary projects including soft robotics, interactive fabrics, systems for personal crafting, and physical reality games. Read More

Constanza Piña Pardo [Curicó, 1984] is a visual artist, dancer and researcher, focused on experimentation with electronic media, free technologies and DIWO methodologies. Her artistic proposals are presented in various formats integrating dance, installation, sound performance and social practices. Read More

New York born and raised, Nicolas Collins spent most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was Artistic Director of STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin. He is a Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1999, and a Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent). Read More

Darren T. Hamm was selected as the first executive director of Oberlin Center for the Arts in March 2017. He provides leadership for establishing the organization’s vision and programming and support for advancing arts and culture throughout the region. Read More

Audrey Briot (FR) is a textile designer, technologist and researcher. She is cofounder of DataPaulette, a collective and hackerspace dedicated to research in textiles technologies and soft materials. Her work is dedicated to the positive impact of emerging technologies on the preservation of savoir-faire, especially in textiles. Read More

James W. Peake is a paper folding expert based in Oberlin, OH, who specializes in folding and teaching origami, as well as curating origami exhibitions. Read More

Chris Collins is an educator, artist, and technologist based in Chicago. As an educator, Chris is a lecturer at UIC where they teach CS students how to engage with art, as well as at SAIC, teaching art students how to engage with technology. Read More

Jess Rowland is a sound artist, musician, and composer, and a 2018-20 Princeton Arts Fellow. Much of her work explores the relationship between technologies and popular culture, continually aiming to reconcile the world of art and the world of science. Read More

Ekene Ijeoma is an artist, Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, and Director of the Poetic Justice group at MIT Media Lab. Through his lab and studio art practices, Ijeoma researches social inequality across multiple fields to develop communal empathy through sound, video, sculpture, and installation art. Read More

Christina Neilson‘s research tackles the relationship between theory and practice, especially the meaning of materials and techniques, primarily in Europe but also in Latin America. Her book, Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop. Verrocchio and the Epistemology of Making Art, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, explores the significance of processes of making in the oeuvre of the 15th-century Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio. Read More

Rachel Gibson is a percussionist and music technologist from Tower City, Pennsylvania. She is currently attending the University of Virginia to pursue a Ph.D. in Music Composition and Computer Technologies. Rachel studied percussion with Michael Rosen and Bob Nowak and computer music with Aurie Hsu and Abby Aresty. Read More

Ari Melenciano is a designer, creative technologist and researcher who is passionate about exploring the relationships between various forms of design and sentient experiences. She is a creative technologist at Google’s Creative Lab, professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Graduate Program, and founder of Afrotectopia,Read More

Dr. Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Zuni/Tlingit) is an assistant professor and the inaugural Jill and Joe McKinstry Endowed Faculty Fellow of Native North American Indigenous Knowledge at the University of Washington’s Information School. Read More

Sara Trail learned to sew at the young age of 4, and is now a successful author, sewing teacher and pattern and fabric designer. At age 13, she wrote a nationally published book, “Sew with Sara” that teaches teens and tweens how to sew cute clothes and accessories for fun and profit. Read More

Maya McCollum is a TIMARA and Studio Art major at Oberlin College and Conservatory. She enjoys exploring different avenues for melding her visual and sonic practices in a variety of mediums. Read More

Dr. Brenda Pongracz joined Lorain County Community College in August of 2018 as Dean of Arts & Humanities. In March 2020, she took on the additional role of Interim Associate Provost of the University Partnership. In both roles, Dr. Pongracz works to increase student success through new partnerships and opportunities as well as working with faculty on curriculum development and program improvements. Read More

Emily Barton is the author of three novels: The Book of Esther, Brookland, and The Testament of Yves Gundron. Her fiction, criticism, and essays have appeared in many publications, including Story magazine, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, the Massachusetts Review, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Jewish Daily Forward’s Sisterhood blog, the New York Observer, Poetry magazine, Tablet.com, Kveller.com, and the Threepenny Review. Read More

Wendy Kozol is professor and program director of Comparative American Studies with a concentration in visual culture studies. She joined the Oberlin faculty in 1992, first in the History Department and then in Gender and Women’s Studies Program before moving to her present position. Her research and teaching interests include visual culture studies, comparative feminist theories and methodologies, and militarization, human rights and visual witnessing. Read More

Joan Perch began her career as an arts educator and owner of several successful art galleries in downtown Cleveland. Recognizing the opportunity to combine and implement cutting-edge approaches to the fields of art, technology, business, and civic and economic development, Joan has pioneered programs that embraced innovation to further the impact of the arts. Read More

Tanya Aguiñiga was born in 1978 in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. An artist, designer, and craftsperson, Aguiñiga works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Read More

Matthew Hollern is Professor and Chair of Jewelry + Metals at the Cleveland Institute of Art where he has taught jewelry + metals, CAD + 3D printing, and business since 1989. He is a co-founder of Cadlaboration, an inter-institutional collaboration established to contribute to the ongoing evolution of the field of jewelry and metals by fostering education and substantive collaboration among artists working with digital technologies. Read More

Gregory Little is an artist, teacher, and writer.  His projects have been exhibited in international venues and presented at conferences in the US, Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia.  Exhibitions and screenings include at the Van Der Plas Gallery, NYC, Lemmon Gallery, Kent State University, Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, Olympia Fine Arts, Guwahati, India,  Langkawi Art Biennale, Malaysia, Read More

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. Read More

Jason Williams aka Professor STEM is the founder of Get with the Program, Inc., which is the number one youth-STEM organization this side of the Milky Way (and fastest growing youth organization in Northeast Ohio). He is also the author of The Awesome Adventures of Amina and Amir: COVID-19 and the 5 Healthy Habits. This children’s book, which stars his three children, is the first of a series designed to engage children around STEM. Read More

Asha Tamirisa [she/her/hers] works with sound, video, film, and researches media histories. Along with many colleagues, Asha co-founded OPENSIGNAL, a collective of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in electronic music and art practice. She now works with the organization TECHNE (technesound.org). Read More

Kelly Pontoni’s work focuses on LGBTQ+ issues, history along with a strong emphasis on AIDS, currently and historically. Through the medium of printmaking Pontoni has pushed the limits of technology to support her work conceptually. Read More

Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao 高新綠
Dr. Kao is an Assistant Professor in Design+Environmental Analysis, with graduate field faculty appointments in Information Science, and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Cornell University. She founded and directs the Hybrid Body Lab. Her research practice themed Hybrid Body Craft blends aesthetic and cultural perspectives into the design of on-body interfaces. Read More