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FilmGate Interactive
Media Festival #09
GUEST SPEAKERS
Darrell Booker
Darrell leads one of Microsoft’s most important racial equity commitments, the Nonprofit Tech Acceleration of Black and African American Communities, a national program designed at leveling the tech playing field for nonprofits serving our most underserved communities. Prior to leading this program, Darrell served in an advisor role at Microsoft helping the world’s largest nonprofits such as The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, American Cancer Society, and the Salvation Army on their digital transformation to the cloud. Darrell has served in CIO and CTO roles in the past leading teams of developers in industries such as child welfare, automotive and banking. Darrell has a big passion for working at the intersection of tech and culture. He chairs the board of several nonprofit organizations while playing advisories roles to many other organizations.
Tamara Shogaolu
Tamara Shogaolu is an Emmy award-winning director, writer, artist, and creative technologist whose innovative approach to storytelling has been lauded by Forbes, The Guardian, and Vogue naming her a visionary in the field.
As the founder and creative director of Ado Ato Pictures, Shogaolu is the first Black Latina woman to head a leading studio specializing in film, animation, and technology. With an emphasis on storytelling that uplifts historically marginalized voices, her dynamic work has been shown at top festivals, galleries, and museums worldwide including the MoMA in New York, Tribeca Film Festival, and the National Gallery of Indonesia, among others. In addition, Shogaolu has written for Sony Pictures Animations and partnered on projects with the Sundance Institute, Netflix, PBS, Frontline, and the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF).
Shogaolu won the 2022 SXSW Innovation Award for Visual Media, the Best Digital Storytelling Award at IDFA 2021, and was nominated for a Gouden Kalf Award, the top film prize in the Netherlands (2019, 2022).
Nelly Gocheva
Nelly has 15+ years of experience developing media brands and creative strategies within start-ups and legacy brands across North America, Europe and Asia. Through the years, she's held senior positions at Soho House, The New York Times, Monocle Magazine and currently – Apple. Organizations and brands she's worked with on consultancy and brand-marketing partnerships include Nike, Airbnb, LVMH, L’Oréal, Rimowa, Burberry, Chanel, UBS, Credit Suisse, Samsung, BMW, Korean Air, Singapore Tourism Board, the City of Rio de Janeiro, Wunderman Thompson and Diet Coke.
Savannah Niles
Savannah Niles is a multi-disciplinary product and design leader with 7 years experience working in XR. Most recently, Savannah was the Director of Interaction Design and Product Experience at Magic Leap, a Florida-based augmented reality startup. For 5 years at Magic Leap, Savannah has designed, prototyped, and shipped a wide range of hardware and software products, with 20+ patent applications and grants. Savannah graduated from the MIT Media Lab with her Master's in 2015. She has designed interactive experiences for Walt Disney Imagineering and Twitter, and has served as a juror at SIGGRAPH for 3 years.
Joanna Popper is an award-winning Hollywood and Silicon Valley media executive with a track record of launching cutting edge content and technology to drive revenue, audience engagement and brand love. She currently leads HP’s Virtual Reality initiatives for Go-To-Market and Location Based Entertainment. Joanna is Executive Producer on “Breonna’s Garden” which premiered at the Tribeca Festival.
Joanna was selected as “50 Women Can Change the World in Media and Entertainment,” “Top 50 Original Thinkers in VR,” “Top Women in Media: Game Changers,” “Top Women in Media: Industry Leaders,” “Digital It List,” “101 Women Leading the VR Industry” and is on the Coalition for the Women in XR Fund.
Emma Chiu
Emma Chiu is global director of Wunderman Thompson Intelligence, the agency’s in-house futures and innovation think-tank. She consults with clients to build long-term strategies based on qualitative and quantitative insight that incorporates cultural and behavioral change, sector innovation and zeitgeist shifts.
Emma’s foresight and thought leadership has been picked up by global publications and has been featured in The Telegraph, New York Magazine and Vogue. She is a member of the WARC Awards and Creativepool 2020 judging panel. In addition, Emma regularly speaks at conferences including SXSW, Adobe Max and Pause Fest.
Mauricio Ferrazza
Mauricio Ferrazza has been working with animation production for film and TV for over 25 years. With a B.A. in Advertising and Marketing, and a M.F.A. in Computer Animation, Ferrazza specialized in dynamics and particle simulation, creating motion and recreating natural phenomena through the application of the principles of physics. Storytelling has also been a focus for Ferrazza, researching the different ways storytelling engage audiences, character-driven stories for film production, and how it’s now infused in branding and sales.
James Powderly
James Powderly is an award-winning technology designer known for inventing tools to empower artists to augment the world. His vision and designs have made a broad cultural and engineering impact with acknowledged contributions in digital art, open source and augmented reality technology. His work can be found in the permanent collection of MoMA, in Snapchat's hardware products and on the surface of Mars. James is the most recent member to join the board at Filmgate Miami. His focus is on identifying and supporting a diverse cohort of creators innovating at the intersection of cryptoart and emerging tech like generative AI and augmented reality.
Sam Schoonover
Legal Coordinator of USCRI Mexico
Sam Schoonover is the Innovation Lead for Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Working at the cross section of music and technology, he and his team combine culture and new technologies to help build the future of music and live events. At Coachella, they produce and manages the festival's XR, web3, gaming, and community development programs and work with various departments at the festival to build new experiences for fans and brands.
Ivona Tau
Ivona Tau, PhD is a generative A.I. artist from Vilnius, Lithuania, who combines generative art, deep neural networks and personal memories embedded in photography. Her goal is to find and evoke emotions through artificially intelligent tools. Tau’s work has been exhibited widely, including The House of Fine Art, CAFA, Frieze LA, Art Week Shenzhen, Vellum LA, Bright Moments Berlin and Sotheby’s New York.
Michelle Abbs
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Michelle is internationally recognized as a trailblazer and community builder in Web3. She was featured in Forbes as a Top Woman in NFT and named one of Top 16 Most Influential Women in NFTs and listed among the Top 100 Women in Web3 & The Metaverse for her accomplishments.
She is the founder of Web3 Equity, an educational company to onboard and empower more women to engage in web3 as investors, collectors, creators and builders. In partnership with City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez she launched an NFT collection called the Tuttle Tribe. She has led in person training for more than 3,500 attendees since launching in January. Her approach to web3 education has caught the attention of major brands and she has consulted on training, onboarding and overall strategies for The Sandbox, BFF, Cisneros Media, One Sotheby’s and more.
Doug Roberts, Ph. D.
Dr. Roberts has lead scientific visualization efforts for researchers at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, as well as the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Most recently, he led the technology efforts at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, planning huge updates to its Omni theater.
Although science education and public engagement take up most of his time, Dr. Roberts is also engaged in active research using telescopes like the Very Large Array radio telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope to better understand the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Vivian Marthell
Vivian Marthell (she/her) is the co-founder and co-director of O Cinema, Miami’s largest independent art house cinema. In 2015, she received the Knight Arts Champion award presented by the Knight Foundation in recognition of O Cinema's contribution to the cultural vibrancy of Greater Miami. Her experience in arts and non-profit management includes her stint as co-director of Lab6, project manager for Tigertail Productions, and arts administrator for Working Classroom. She has written for local publications and lectured on the arts and art activism. She is currently a fellow collaborator in the art collectives FatLip, META Miami (Miami Emerging Technology & Art), and the Dark Matter Group. She serves on the boards of Pioneer Winter Collective, Hanan Arts, and FilmGate Interactive.
Diliana Alexander
Diliana Alexander is the Executive Director of FilmGate Miami. Diliana Alexander studied Economics, Finance and International Relations at McGill University and later the University of Toronto. She completed her MFA in Film Production at the Miami International University of Art and Design.
Diliana began her careers in Canada as a producer, where she worked for CBC, HGTV, the Learning Channel and Showtime. She is especially interested in the convergence of art, science and technology. She also teaches film at Florida International University and is directing a feature film based on the young adult novel NARC, written by Florida book award winner Crissa Jean Chappell.
Tangy Frederick
Tangy Frederick is the founder of Regal Unicorn Software Academy who started as a Software Engineer. Tangy and her Regal Unicorn team works with existing and aspiring engineers, and tech entrepreneurs. The tech accelerator’s focus is educating its cadets on developing XR, immersive technology, mobile applications, and web3 technologies, along with the concepts of AI/Machine Learning and IoT. The three pillars that Regal Unicorn Software Academy focuses on, with the engineering cadets, are developing content/apps, curriculum and educating communities nationwide.
Katsutoshi Machiba
He studied filmmaking in the U.S. He has worked as a TV director, a Japanese
language producer at 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Japan, and a Gear VR
producer at Samsung Electronics Japan. He has produced a number of VR projects
since 2016, which have been highly acclaimed at domestic and international film
festivals. Nominated for the 79th Venice International Film Festival's VR section
"VENICE Immersive" as a competition film. He is also involved in the launch of
online portal services and location-based services as a place to experience VR
movies in Japan.
Min-Wei Kuo
Came from filmmaking background, currently working as International Coordinator at Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA), mainly focus on international partnerships, promotion of Taiwan original immersive contents and industry bridging. Skilled in cross-field international communication, project management, immersive content programming and showcase arrangement, as well experienced in VR / XR content licensing and festival strategy.
Previously worked as XR Program Manager at Kaohsiung Film Festival - XR Dreamland, one of the biggest immersive festival in Asia; Program Manager at VR FILM LAB, Taiwan’s first venue specialized in cinematic VR content showcase; and as head of Kaohsiung VR FILM LAB original contents’ international distribution.
Mathieu Rozières
Mathieu Rozières is the founder of the creative agency Euphoriques and its little sister, the art & tech production agency Dark Euphoria.
Vice-president of the French Tech Aix-Marseille from 2019 to 2021, in charge of innovation and creative industries, he has been focusing for several years on the development of the new generation of artistic projects combining innovative technologies, interactive scenography and new forms of narration.
Mathieu is part of a digital transition of culture in order to renew audiences and make works accessible to an audience that does not have the codes. He develops numerous partnerships [Meet, Vhram, Ars Electronica, Chroniques, Edis] with cultural venues and festivals and organises hybridisation residencies as part of Creative Europe projects (Real In, Rit).
Denise Mendez
Denise Mendez is currently a Principal Software Engineer in Microsoft’s Mixed Reality group making science fiction real building ground truth systems for data science and telemetry for the Environmental Understanding runtimes for the Hololens. From her years with Motorola she built manufacturing systems to ship millions of smartphones. She worked at Magic Leap, the largest privately funded startup in history, and helped launch their first Spatial Computer headset. She owns a small business teaching the art of ceramics and has ambitions to create a revolution in education by bringing mixed reality holograms into schools.
Camille Jeanjean
Camille Jeanjean is passionate about projects at the crossroads between culture and technology. From journalism to production and now New Media industry, she brings creators and storytelling together on different scale to inspire meaningful connection. She is currently an Officer for New Media at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US and promotes French and American cooperation.
Jay Kim
Jay Kim, the XR curator of the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN), introduced Virtual Reality (VR) content at BIFAN in 2016 for the first time among Korean film festivals and has been in charge of BIFAN's XR section program for seven years so far. Also, he newly established the BIFAN Beyond Reality section in 2019 and has introduced a variety of new media content to the audience.
Also Jay produced many XR projects since he jumped into this industry from the filmmaking business in 2016, and his projects were invited to multiple international film festivals like Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW and IDFA and so on.
Jay founded Gii%ii studio in 2020 and is currently focusing on expanding the new media content ecosystem in South Korea.
Pavani Yalla
Pavani has spent the last 15 years designing and directing multimodal experiences that span digital, physical, and social realms. Whether it’s an immersive museum exhibit, a consumer mobile application, or an enterprise platform—her work architects emotion to incite action. Currently she leads the talented team responsible for designing Magic Leap 2’s AR platform.
Reverend Houston Cypress
Rev. Houston R. Cypress is a Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer Artist and Environmentalist from the Otter Clan of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida.
Houston believes that when it comes to environmental conservation, indigenous rights are everyone’s rights, and that creative solidarity with nature means expanding our praxis of “chosen family.” He in-joys bringing communities together through art and technology. He serves on the Miccosukee Tribe’s Environmental Advisory Committee, and also their Festival Committee. He’s been serving the Love The Everglades Movement for 10 years – an environmental nonprofit concerned with indigenous solidarity, action, art, multifaith coalition-building, and reciprocity with nature. He presented at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami’s Art + Research Center, and contributed to their Digital Commissions. Houston received the 2022 Grassroots Activism Award and the 2022 Marjory Stoneman Douglas Poetry Award. He also helped to produce the first 2LGBTQ+ Pride Festival on Miccosukee homelands.
Tammy Peddle
Tammy Peddle manages marketing & distribution for interactive and digital projects at the National Film Board of Canada. Over the years, she has worked on a number of award-winning and critically acclaimed NFB projects. As an experienced founder, Tammy’s know-how spans the fields of marketing management, business development, strategic planning, publicity and digital strategy.
Tammy is actively involved in Quebec’s cultural and political communities as well as in the Canadian music industry and various other causes. She has been a member of the board of the Ballets Jazz de Montréal since 2013 and currently serves as president of the BJM’s Marketing Communications Committee.
Michael Pickering
A visionary leader and unrepentant code conjurer, Mr. Pickering founded
CloudConstable to make fun and friendly animated service avatars affordable for venues everywhere. In high demand as a speaker and international expert on human/avatar interaction, he’s led a successful team through multiple rounds of the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE competition, and serves as a theme lead for “Engaging trust in visitors” on the SENTRYnet project, funded by the Canadian Department of National Defence through their Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) program.
Atley Loughridge
Atley is a game designer and engineer. For Snap, she works on Spectacles to advance wearable AR interactions and experiences. Prior, she's worked at OK Play, Funktronic Labs, Gentle Manhands, Within, Cabbibo and XR Coven on mobile and XR narrative and rhythm action games. In her personal games, Atley strives to marry meaning and mechanics to express elusive emotions. She's a member of Glitch City LA.
Ivan Zhyzhkevych
Ivan Zhyzhkevych is an art collector, digital art fund manager, and artist advocate. He began collecting at the very beginning of Hicetnunc (the earliest Tezos NFT platform), up to the recent FXHASH & Objkt.com. His primary goal is to broaden the awareness of digital art.
Zhyzhkevych has been a featured speaker at Proof Of People, and on behalf of Tezos at leading art events like Art Basel. He has also aided in organizing Generative Art events such as “Industrial Devolution '' by Bright Moments.
Nicolas S. Roy
Nicolas S. Roy is the CEO and Executive Creative Director at Dpt., a studio meshing the virtual and physical. Over the years, he has produced and directed over a hundred interactive and immersive experiences with institutions such as Nike, Cirque du Soleil, the National Film Board of Canada, the World Bank, Google, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Ubisoft. His projects have premiered and been showcased at Cannes XR, the Venice Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and in museums and on streets all around the world. Nicolas is also a speaker and has given talks at events such as SXSW, Mutek, VR/AR Global Summit, the World VR Forum and Unity for Humanity.
Édith Jorisch
A film and television director based in Montreal, Édith Jorisch writes and directs documentary and fiction that challenge contemporary notions of identity and migration. Her work centers on social vices through a bittersweet and human lens. In 2017, her documentary L’héritier was selected for the FIFA and won the Gémeaux prizes for both best director and best documentary show. Her work has been broadcast on Télé-Québec, Radio-Canada, RDI, TV5, TF1 and Histoire. Édith turned to fiction with the short film Tibbits Hill, an allegorical fable on music as an anti-militarist weapon, which earned her a selection at the FNC in 2021. AWE, her most recent short film which premiered online on the site NOWNESS, offered her an opportunity to mix fiction and documentary. She is presently working on writing her first feature film, which was selected in 2020 at Forge Québec Cinéma, presented by Netflix.
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Miri Chekhanovich
A multidisciplinary visual artist, Miri Chekhanovich combines research in biomaterials, video, and installation. Born in Armenia, Miri grew up in Jerusalem and immigrated to Canada in 2013. She currently lives and works in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), where she obtained her MFA at Concordia University, within the Department of Fibers and Material Practices. Her creation emerges from a gentle state of urgency, which leads her to sharing and intervening in the public space. She is interested in neglected materials, geological history, traumatic wounds and the illusion of time. Her work is an invitation to slowness and the development of a strong sense of care. Her video installation Being with was presented by the Phi center in Montreal, as well as part of the Venice Biennale in 2019. Miri Chekhanovich’s work is supported by the CAC, the CALQ, the NFB and the research grant from the FRQSC.
Mirko Vogel
Mirko Vogel (Lead Sound Designer and Managing Partner at Vaudeville Sound ) is an experienced and internationally recognized sound designer, composer, engineer and software developer.
Mirko’s projects have taken him to over 60 countries with a broad spectrum of collaborations from indie rock bands to Grammy-winning artists, brands, filmmakers, TV producers and Video Game publishers. Mirko's work has featured in countless projects and collaborations with festivals, brands, artists video games and film productions for Netflix, Shutterstock, Universal, HBO, Selfridges London, BBC, iTV, MTV, Comedy Central, AMC Networks, CBS, Viacom, and Nintendo, Cut Copy, Flume, Sofi Tucker among many others
Pierre Zandrowicz
Pierre Zandrowicz works at the crossroads of videogames, theatre, art and film. Every new technological step is considered, examined, tested and, if viable, adopted and used. A new film, «Ex Anima», made with Bartabbas, is shot in stereoscopic 360 and produced by Arte and MK2. Another VR film is made about the Grotte Chauvet, to celebrate its inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage list of protected sites, with the partnership of Google Arts & Culture.
Lately he directed «Mirror», a Sci-Fi VR film to be shot this year with Zita Hanrot in the lead (César du Meilleur Espoir Féminin 2016) The film got selected at the Venice biennale 2020.
Victoria Bousis
Victoria started as a career prosecutor for the Attorney General of Illinois to bring justice to the disenfranchised. As a producer, she transcended social, political, and geographical barriers to bring powerful messages to global audiences with notable films showcased at Venice, TIFF, and Sundance.
In 2018, Victoria earned a Master’s in Media, Technology, and Innovation from MIT, converging cinema, gaming and neuroscience to deliver character-driven stories to be experienced by audiences with agency. Stay Alive My Son is her directorial debut, officially selected in Cannes’ development showcase in 2020, Venice in 2022, and won “Best Experience” and “Revolutionary Director,” “Best Debut Director” in Sweden, Hong Kong, and Singapore in 2022.
Jimmy Cheng
Director of International Partnership at Sandman Studios / Sandbox Immersive Festival. Jimmy is focusing on XR distribution, representing contents from over 170 XR studios (Atlas V / Floreal Films / City Lights /etc.), and servicing different Chinese platforms or hardware companies to find suitable distribution opportunities. Meanwhile, Jimmy is leading the conversation / partnership between Sandman Studios and different international film festivals / XR studios. The distribution / licensing model of XR content was immature even until today, which is why Jimmy saw the opportunity to form a solid business model for supporting the creators / studios to distribute their projects and generate reasonable revenue. From November 2018 till today, Jimmy has signed over US$ 9M as licensing fee to support the XR ecosystem / licensing model growing more mature.
Eddie Lou
Founder of Sandman Studios & Sandbox Immersive Festival (SIF). Eddie was graduated from Imperial College London, University of the Arts London, and London Business School. As a VR expert, Eddie is focusing on pushing the development of narrative VR content industry in China and has been invited to
speak at major film festivals, such as Venice, SXSW, Berlinale, Cannes, etc.
Sandman Studios is the leading company of AR/VR in China as Free Whale, Fresh Out, and Mandala were premiered and selected by Venice VR competition from 2017 to 2022, which Mandala is also a co-production project with Digital Rise in France. Eddie and his team are developing a new metaverse virtual platform that can provide interactive, immersive, and entertainment for creators, event companies, curators, and brands.
Ahnahktsipiitaa (Colin Van Loon)
Filmmaker Ahnahktsipiitaa is Blackfoot and Dutch, originally hailing from The Piikani Nation. During his upbringing he resided alongside his mother in Lethbridge and many other dusty Southern Alberta towns. Currently, Ahnahktsipiitaa is the Operations Manager for the Indigenous Matriarchs 4 AR/VR media lab (IM4-Lab). Ahnahktsipiitaa sits on Telefilm Indigenous Working Group, among others. Community centred, he aims to elevate the voices and stories of Indigenous peoples, whether creating spaces for youth works in the Talking Stick’s Festivals REEL Reservation: Indigenous Cinematic Indigenous Sovereignty Series or through his company Blackfoot Nation Films.
Karan4D
karan4d is an artist that focuses on interpreting the noosphere through digital ersatz and artificial intelligence.
He is the co-developer of the souls diffusion model family and a co-founder of the Deforum collective (deforum.art)
He has shown work at BTC Miami, Art Basel Miami, Frieze London Art Fair, and DCentral Miami to name a few events.
karan4d’s work deconstructs human generated semiotics, such as text and visual art, and resynthesizes them in the form of audiovisual experiences via large language and computer vision models.
Sofia Crespo
Sofia Crespo is an artist working with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. Crespo looks at the similarities between techniques of AI image formation, and the way that humans express themselves creatively and cognitively recognize their world. Her work brings into question the potential of AI in artistic practice and its ability to reshape our understandings of creativity. On the side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques. She’s also the co-founder of Entangled Others Studio.
Adam Rogers
Adam Rogers is an experienced, versatile creative leader with 20 years’ experience producing and successfully launching award-winning innovative storytelling and music projects, through a variety of mediums.
A career beginning as a DVD producer for Technicolors London studio. He went on to produce groundbreaking music DVD/Blu-Ray for bands such as Depeche Mode, Franz Ferdinand and The Who.
Adam is now Head of Studio and VP of Creative for Departure Lounge , which includes Metastage Vancouver. A Vancouver based Metaverse focused company pioneering tools, technology, and immersive creative projects.
James Hursthouse
James Hursthouse is a twenty-year veteran of the global games and digital media sector. He has proven success across content development and publishing, infrastructure and technology for ‘games as a service’, and with technologies such as mixed reality, blockchain and artificial intelligence. He was a contributing author to ‘The Metaverse Roadmap’ whitepaper in 2007 and has been developing initiatives that could be considered precursors to the current ‘Metaverse boom’ for over fifteen years.
Hugo Laliberté
Hugo Laliberté is a Creative Coder who started his career by freelancing in 2010. He currently co-directs the experiential design studio Ottomata. He learned to program at the age of 12 starting with web development and slowly experimenting with indie game development. He co-founded the media art collective Out of Sight in 2013 which slowly evolved into what we know as Ottomata today. His most impactful projects were presented on CBC Radio-Canada and are present in some media art anthologies. Some of these pieces were presented at Chromatic Festival, Technological Art Society, Jutra prize night, Livart Gallery, etc. His most recent projects were presented in Montreal, Dubai and even Tokyo.
Jose Jacho
Jose Jacho is the co-founder of Filmgate Miami and the Downtown Media Center. He is an out-of-the box thinker and creator, who seeks to establish and maintain South Florida as legitimate location for advancing the arts with the aid of technology
Lola Baraldi
Lola Baraldi is a cultural project manager invested in the electronic music industry and the nighttime economy. As MUTEK Festival’s Partnerships & Digital Projects Coordinator, she manages the Immersive Collection — the Festival’s first virtual reality productions. An electronic music and digital art gathering for 23 years in Montréal, MUTEK now aims to create new pathways for creators, by producing and distributing XR art.
Lola also co-founded the Montréal edition of shesaid.so, part of a global network aiming to create opportunities for women, allies and non-binary people working in music. She is now studying Cultural and Artistic Management and sits on Montréal’s Night Council as part of the Health, Safety, Inclusion and Diversity committee