Douglas Rushkoff | Team Human

Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Team Human, based on his podcast, as well as the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He is a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen.

Amelia Winger Bearskin | Contentful

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist, technologist, and organizer who develops cultural communities at the intersection of art, technology, and education. She founded IDEA New Rochelle, which partnered with the NR Mayor’s office to develop citizen-focused VR/AR tools and was awarded the 2018 Bloomberg Mayors Challenge $1 million dollar grant to prototype their AR Citizen toolkit. She is a Google VR JUMP Start creator, co-directing with Wendy Red Star a 360 video story about Native American Monsters which was selected for a McArthur Grant through the Sundance Institute Native New Frontiers Story Lab 2018. It is on display at Newark Museum beginning February 2019.

Amelia was a professor of time-based media art and performance art at Vanderbilt University for five years before returning to her roots in NYC creative technology, graduating from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2015. In 2016 she went on to found and direct the DBRS Innovation Labs, an applied ai research lab that specialized in developing creative uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.

Amelia is the founder of the Stupid Hackathon, which now holds events around the world. She is a fellow of the Sundance New Frontiers Lab 2017 , a 2017 Sundance Institute Time Warner Fellow, in 2017 she was awarded the Engadget Alternative Realities Prize for her VR experience Your Hands Are Feet in collaboration with Sarah Rothberg. She was a member of the 2017-2018 cohort at NEW INC (the New Museum‘s cultural incubator). In 2016 she was an Oculus Launch Pad Fellow and an Artist in Residence at Pioneer Works 2016, Her art is part of the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the McCord Museum. Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.

Keram Malicki-Sanchez | Constant Change Media Group

Keram founded VRTO in spring 2015. He is also the editor-in-chief of IndieGameReviewer.com since 2008 and founder of FIVARS – the Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories. A graduate of UCLA’s certification programs in Cinematography, Producing and Digital Media, respectively, Malicki-Sanchez is also an alumnus of Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School – Los Angeles chapter – and has 30 years of experience as an actor in over 65 films and television shows including American History X, John Q, True Blood and 24.

He has been asked to speak about the intersection of technology and the arts at NXNE, Cinegear Expo (Los Angeles), the Toronto Star, Toronto Tech Week, CNE Innovation Garage, Digital Hollywood, NAB (Las Vegas), ideacity, TieCon and many more. He is also the founder of Transportive Technology – a virtual reality production company and Constant Change Media Group – a 360 media company and disruptive media consultation firm.