Program 2026

Lele Barnett

Lele Barnett is a Curator and Program Director who has spent over 25 years helping artists, collectors, and organizations find each other and do meaningful work together — including more than a decade embedded in some of the world’s leading tech companies. At Meta Reality Labs Research, she co-created the ART and Expansive Thinking program with Doug Carmean. Over her career, she has served as a curator for Meta Open Arts, the Microsoft Art Collection, the Starbucks Art Collection, and the Washington State Arts Commission. She was also co-founder of McLeod Residence, a home for extraordinary living through art, technology, and collaboration. At xispa, she leads programming, partnerships, and the artist residency model she helped pioneer.

Aubrey Birdwell

Aubrey Birdwell is a Seattle-based artist and researcher working across media and technology. His work often begins with familiar forms such as signs, screens, text, video, and data, which he reworks through physical and computational processes, sometimes deriving meaning from the materials, technologies, and the processes themselves. Recurring concerns include architectures of language, physical and digital forms of memory, disappearance, and digital decay. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at CICA Museum, Manifest Gallery, and Pacific Science Center. Birdwell is a 2026–27 New Media Gallery artist at Jack Straw Cultural Center and an artist-in-residence at Passable. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Yuliya Bruk

Yuliya Bruk (she/they) is a Soviet born creative director, new media artist, and community facilitator who has crafted interhuman experiences through cameras, curation, and public programming since before the internet. In 2021, Yuliya founded a Seattle based, global community emerging tech/arts nonprofit, Future Arts, building dignity for artists working with technology. Women and non-binary lead, Future Arts bridges accessible opportunities across ages, cultures, and industries, keeping natural systems as a grounding ancestral force. Yuliya enjoys aquascaping, dancing, and dialing rotary phones through her VR headset.

Doug Carmean

Doug Carmean is an avid art collector, painter, and technologist whose work sits at the intersection of art and emerging technology. At Meta Reality Labs Research, he co-created the ART and Expansive Thinking program, collaborating directly with artists to explore how new technologies could expand creative practice. Over a 40-year career in the technology sector — as a Director of Research Science at Meta, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, and Intel Fellow — Doug developed deep expertise in computing systems and optics, knowledge he now brings to bear in service of artistic experimentation. At xispa, he works alongside artists as Lead Artist-Technologist, translating technical possibilities into creative tools and collaborative frameworks.

KC Cole

KC Cole is the author of eight non-fiction books, including The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty. She is senior senior correspondent at Wired, and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times and many other publications. She currently teaches two courses in the UW Honors program: The Art of Understanding Science and The Science of Human Values. For 20 years, she explored connections between science, art and politics first at the Cornelia Street Café in New York and subsequently through Categorically Not! at Santa Monica Art Studios.

Thomas Deuel

Thomas Deuel is a neuroscientist, musician, neurologist, and sound artist whose work explores the intersection of neurophysiology, sound, and human expression. Drawing on training in music composition, neurology, electrophysiology of the brain, his earlier practice combined field recordings, cultural geography, and the neuroscience of listening to create immersive auditory environments. His experiences working and recording in remote regions and native cultures – from the Venezuelan Amazon and Northeastern Greenland to the Indian Himalaya and the Philippine – shaped his interest in the distinctive sonic character of place and in the ways culture, environment, and memory influence how we hear and interpret sound.

Deuel’s more recent work investigates how brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can enable the motor impaired to be empowered to create music again after neurological injuries such as stroke, as well as to use the power of music to augment and improve their rehabilitation. He is the creator of the Encephalophone, a direct brain–music interface that uses electroencephalography (EEG) to allow a person to generate and control music without physical movement. Situated between musical instrument, neuroscience experiment, and assistive technology, the Encephalophone reflects his broader effort to dissolve boundaries between scientific inquiry, neurological assist devices and artistic practice. Through performances with paralyzed musicians, as well as experiments exploring the use of the Encephalophone as an assist device for neurological rehabilitation, Deuel seeks to create experiences that reveal the power of music to empower the motor disabled to express themselves as well as recover motor function for improved quality of life.

Reilly Donovan

Reilly Donovan (b. 1984, Seattle, WA) is a new media artist making digital artworks that span interactive installation, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and mobile and web-based experience. His practice treats emerging technologies not as tools but as subjects — each work built inside the medium it interrogates, using the machinery of simulation, perception, and machine intelligence to examine how these systems reshape what we sense, believe, and become.

Donovan’s recent work centers on artificial intelligence as both material and question: what AI is, how humans project meaning onto it, and how our participation with these systems — direct and indirect — is quietly authoring our collective future. In The Word of the Future (Museum of Museums, Seattle, 2021), a collaboration with artist Jacob Fennell, modified neural networks generated an evolving machine-made religion — sermons, liturgical music, and shape-shifting stained glass — examining how humanity’s faith in technology mirrors the meaning-making structures of belief itself. The Seattle Times described the work as machines “not only building a new religion, but learning how to build a religion.”

Donovan has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2015, including Design Basel (Switzerland), Currents International New Media Festival (Santa Fe), Seattle Art Fair, and the Seattle Art Museum. His collaborations with sculptor John Grade produced mixed reality installations at the Mystic Seaport Museum (Connecticut) and the Anchorage Museum (Alaska), merging physical sculpture with responsive digital environments. He has held artist residencies at Pilchuck Glass School (2018) and the Museum of Glass, Tacoma (2019), where he explored the intersection of glass and mixed reality — placing one of humanity’s oldest optical technologies in conversation with its newest.

Theresa Earenfight

Theresa Earenfight is a historian who focuses on women whose lives have been overshadowed by more powerful or prominent men. Her most recent book, a biography of Catherine of Aragon, told the story of her life with King Henry VIII of England, through art and material culture. Her most recent project is a biographical study of Gerda Taro (1910–37), a Polish-German Jewish woman who was the first woman war photographer and the personal and professional partner of Robert Capa.

Janeil Engelstad

With an expansive creative practice working as an artist, scholar, writer and educator Janeil Engelstad has worked in residence and in partnership with institutions, governments, and communities for over three decades. Producing interdisciplinary art projects that address social, historical and environmental concerns throughout the world. Valuing the potential of collaboration, Engelstad’s process for this work involves embedding herself in communities, deep listening, extensive research and building interdisciplinary coalitions.

Engelstad is the Founding Director of Make Art with Purpose (MAP), an organization that produces collaborative, artist led, social practice projects. Her work has been produced and exhibited in partnership with: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; Art Residency Thailand/PREM, Chiang Mai, Thailand; Central European Foundation; Dallas Museum of Art; International Center of Photography, New York City; Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk, Poland; Museum of Arts and Design, New York City; Oboro, Montréal; Stanica Žilina-Záriečie, Slovakia; The US Department of State and many others. A Fulbright Scholar, Engelstad has taught and lectured at universities around the world and is a member of the Social Practice Art Research Center at University of California Santa Cruz, and an Advisory Board Member of the Art and Technology Lab at University of Texas, Dallas.

Janet Galore

janet galore is an interdisciplinary artist and designer based in Seattle. She’s spent over 30 years creating new experiences in emerging tech, from co-designing the first virtual reality game for personal computers in the 1990s, to prototyping at Microsoft Research, to designing AI models at Google DeepMind in her current role. Outside of work, janet co-directs The Grocery Studios, a creative space hosting pop-up music, film, art, workshops, and lectures. Her award-winning art and animation centers on themes of perception, parafiction, and the surreal. janet holds a BS in pure mathematics from the University of Washington and over 25 patents.

Simran Jagnik

Simran Jagnik is a creative technologist, artist, and educator, originally from NYC. She is an Associate Professor of Game Art and Design at Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle University. Her artistic practice explores interaction, perception, and participation through a mix of digital and physical media. She holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design, NY.

Charles Mudede

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory of this birth, but he does remember noticing himself in the mirror for this first time—it happened on May 3, 1972. Mudede is also a filmmaker: Two of his films, Police Beat and Zoo, premiered at Sundance, and Zoo was screened at Cannes. Mudede directed Thin Skin, and has written for the New York Times, Cinema Scope, Ars Electronica, C Theory, and academic journals. He also wrote the liner notes for Best of Del Tha Funkee Homosapien: Elektra Years. Mudede has lived in Seattle since 1989.

David Nixon

David Mitsuo Nixon is a philosopher, educator, musician, and performer based in Seattle. He teaches philosophy and computer science at the University of Washington Bothell, including courses such as Philosophical Explorations of Science Fiction and Ethics and Human Flourishing. He is particularly interested in questions about artificial intelligence, meaning, understanding, and what—if anything—makes human thought distinctive. Outside the university, Nixon is a longtime member of the Seattle performance ensemble “Awesome,” whose work combines music, theater, storytelling, spectacle, and assorted conceptual mischief. His interests tend to gather around the places where art, technology, philosophy, and human weirdness collide.

Reed O’Beirne

Reed is a multi-media artist and technologist who works with techniques ranging from computer vision and virtual reality to filmmaking, photography and music. A common theme in his work is the questioning of the boundaries of these diverse formats. He seeks to evoke the user’s sense of self-awareness in order to open space for their own subjective response to both the artwork and, more importantly, to the nowness of the world around them. His films and art projects have been exhibited at over sixty-five festivals and art events in twenty countries, including the Edinburgh Film Festival, Shanghai’s OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal and the DOK Leipzig. more: https://www.reedoco.io

Robin Oppenheimer

Robin Oppenheimer is a Seattle-based internationally recognized media arts historian, writer, curator, educator, and scholar who has worked in the field since 1980. She was Executive Director of media arts centers in Atlanta (IMAGE Film/Video 1984-89) and Seattle (911 Media Arts 1989-95). Earning a PhD in Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in 2011, she was a Lecturer at the University of Washington Bothell (2008-2015) and adjunct faculty at Cornish College of the Arts (2014-16).Other projects include participating in 9e2 as a media arts historian and working as a media arts historian/writer for Google’s Artist and Machine Intelligence group in Seattle (https://ami.withgoogle.com/). Her areas of research and expertise include media arts histories, with an emphasis on video art, 1960s collaborative art & technology projects (light shows, 9 Evenings and E.A.T.), and media activism.

Ana Pinto da Silva

Ana Pinto da Silva is a design technologist, educator, and civic leader advancing innovation at the intersection of technology, design, and societal impact. Founder and CEO of 2G3R and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design, Ana builds interdisciplinary communities dedicated to shaping equitable and resilient human futures. With a career spanning strategic, future-focused initiatives for Amazon, Microsoft, and NBBJ, Ana’s work explores the intersection of design, technology, policy and innovation. As the founder of Seattle’s Pecha Kucha speaker series and co-founder of Harvard GSD’s global Design Impact initiative, Ana is committed to fostering courageous conversations world-wide. Ana’s leadership includes extensive board service across cultural, civic, and educational institutions.

Cam Smith

Cam Smith is a Seattle-based artist whose work explores how Artificial Intelligence is used for surveillance, exploitation, and violence. His work has been exhibited at the Tacoma Art Museum, the Bellevue Arts Museum, The Pacific Science Center, and galleries across the PNW and nationally. He is the resident artist at Passable and a member of the artist collective Common Area Maintenance. He is the co-author of “AI MUST DIE,” which can be found at Left Bank Books, Elliott Bay Book Company, and dozens of bookshops in the USA and around the world. He actively engages with the public by teaching workshops, giving talks, and hosting office hours that are open to everyone.

Timea Tihanyi

Timea Tihanyi is a Hungarian born interdisciplinary visual artist, ceramicist, and creativity and leadership coach living and working in Seattle, Washington. She is the founder and director of Slip Rabbit, the first technoceramics studio in the Pacific Northwest. Tihanyi is an Emeritus Teaching Professor at the University of Washington and the author of Making and Breaking Rules – Algorithmic Forms and Tactile Processes.

Genevieve Tremblay

Genevieve Tremblay is a Bellevue-based new media artist, interdisciplinary researcher, and convener focused on fostering resilient, cross-disciplinary creative communities. She is an artist member of SOIL Gallery, adjunct researcher at SECOS Millennium Institute (Chile) and Climate Knowledge Collective, and a founding board member of Third Place Technology and Indigo Arts Alliance (Maine). A co-author of Fostering Communities of Innovation at the Intersection of Art and Technology in the PNW, Tremblay brings expertise in mapping and sustaining creative knowledge networks as an organizer of the symposium.

Samantha Yun Wall

Samantha Yun Wall (b. 1977, Seoul) is a Korean-American artist based in Portland, OR. Her drawings and paintings explore the psychological and emotional dimensions of transcultural identity, centering feminine perspectives of diasporic experience. Wall’s art is characterized by her unique approach that combines traditional drawing techniques with a contemporary vernacular reflecting her understanding of the world around her. Wall earned a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and has received awards and grants from organizations including the Seattle Art Museum, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Oregon Arts Commission. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Cue Art Foundation, New York, New York; Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Seattle Art Museum and Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; and the Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul Arts Center, Seoul, South Korea.

Brent Watanabe

Brent Watanabe is an artist combining a background in traditional materials and practices (drawing, sculpture) with emerging technologies (computer programming, electronics), exploring an artistic field still being defined and discovered. His work explores themes of human consumption and waste, our effect on nature and animals, as well as spirituality, suffering and sentience. Using computers, computer programming, robotics, and video game engines, he utilizes technology as a medium to explore these themes in algorithmically controlled gallery and site specific installations, online projects, and video game interventions.

The first of his video game interventions, San Andreas Deer Cam (2016), was presented live on the Internet, had over 800,000 visitors in the first three months, and was written about in dozens of publications, including New York Magazine, the BBC, and WIRED.

Brent has had a number of recent screenings, projects, and exhibitions, nationally and internationally, most recently at Cannonball Arts Center (Seattle, WA, 2025), Shanzhong Tian Art Center (closed by local censorship authorities) (Beijing, China, 2024), Digital Art Festival Taipei (Taipei, Taiwan, 2023), OGR Torino (Torino, Italy, 2023), Bureau Europa (Maastricht, Netherlands, 2022), Centro Cultural Banco de Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2022), a VR artist-in-residence with Meta / Facebook (2021), MassArt Art Museum, (Boston, MA, 2020-22), NTT InterCommunication Center, (Tokyo, Japan, 2019), and MAAT Museum, (Lisbon, Portugal, 2019). He is a four-time MacDowell fellow.

Diana Xie

Diana Xie is a visual artist, immersive designer, and data scientist who turns digital systems into containers for memory and presence – translating data into poetic, embodied experiences. Past work has included turning meditation brain waves into botanic growth, collecting audience participation into MIDI-remixed liquid light shows, and co-founding Ambient Crafts, a multi-sensory show that brought together artists from disparate genres into an evening of immersion. Her current projects – including a field recording-driven light sculpture, and a mural tracing visitors’ imprints – continue this inquiry into what we leave behind.

Rob Zverina

Robert Zverina writes and makes art in the Pacific Northwest. He works across literary genres and artistic media to tell stories and make statements that range from strictly factual to absurdly fanciful. His pioneering creative nonfiction blog Picture of the Day is the longest running website of its kind. Although an early adopter and continued practitioner of the Web as a creative medium, ultimately he is a proponent of physical media who continues to publish books, produce DVDs, and exhibit objects.