Invited Professors

Dr. Anne Nigten (NL) is the initiator and director of The Patching Zone, a transdisciplinary non-profit media laboratory for innovation in Rotterdam (NL). Over the last years she was guest researcher and research professor at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Rotterdam University of Applied Science and Hanze University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. Prior to her current positions she was director of V2_Lab, the aRt&D department of V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam and chair of the Dutch Media Art Association, in the Netherlands. She is lecturing on research and development in the transdisciplinary field from a creatively engaged perspective. She is board member of ISEA international, an international non-profit organisation fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse in art, science and technology. She is advisor for several cultural organisations in the Netherlands and abroad. Anne Nigten completed her PhD at Smartlab, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UK), and frequently publishes papers on (social) innovation as the outcome from collaboration between art, design, engineering and science. 
patchingzone.net
www.researchgate.net/profile/Anne_Nigten
independent.academia.edu/AnneNigten
www.linkedin.com/in/annenigten

Dr. Sabine Seymour is an entrepreneur, researcher, and athlete. As a technologist, Sabine conceives products at the intersection of sensors, data, and the body. As an economist, she develops inventive asset ownership models with distributed technologies. Her recent venture SUPA® is tokenizing the body™ by capturing biometric data from GenZ and provides the anonymized and contextualized data to stakeholders in healthcare. SUPA pays GenZ for their data with tokens that can be exchanged for cash, donated, or re-invest for a fraction ownership of SUPA. MOONDIAL is the nexus between silicon and style™. It is a think tank for clients like Intel, Siemens, GE, Disney.
Sabine was the inaugural professor and director of the Fashionable Technology Lab at Parsons School of Design in New York, led the research project BODYMETAPHOR with co-researcher Miriam Steele at the New School of Social Research, conceived Computational Cellulose at Aalto University, and was the Chair of the Rockefeller Foundation funded Computational Fashion Research Initiative at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center. She authored three books: Fashionable Technology, Functional Aesthetics, and Computational Fashion.
She serves as a board member, startup mentor, and received numerous grants and awards. She was a Tory Burch Foundation Fellow and received the Michael Kalil Fellowship for Smart Design. She is an invited domain expert for Disney, Autodesk, NASA, Lufthansa and public speaker at TEDx, SXSW, Ars Electronica. She was called inventor of the future by Cool Hunting and has been featured in Wired, Vogue, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, New York Times and appeared on PBS, NBC, and ORF. She was featured as an exemplary for her life's work at the Museum of Applied Arts 150 years anniversary exhibition in Vienna.
Sabine holds a PhD and joint-MSc/MBA in Economics and Social Sciences from University of Economics in Vienna and Columbia Business School, and a Master in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. She is an avid snowboarder, surfer, golfer - and sneakerhead, and built a helmet as game controller in 1996.

Dr. Manuela Naveau (AT)
is artist and curator of Ars Electronica Linz and together with the artistic and managing director Gerfried Stocker she developed Ars Electronica Export. She teaches at University of Art and Design Linz as well as at the Paris Lodron University in Salzburg and the Danube University Krems. Her research investigates networks and knowledge in the context of artistic /scientific research methods and practices. Her book „Crowd and Art – Kunst und Partizipation im Internet“ (Crowd and Art – Art and Participation in the Internet) has been published in 2017 in transcript Verlag, Germany. The book is based on her dissertation, for which she received the Award of Excellence from the Austrian Ministry of  Science, Research and Economy  in 2016.
Dr. Manuela Naveau (AT)
ist Künstlerin und Kuratorin der Ars Electronica Linz und entwickelte zusammen mit dem Künstler und Geschäftsführer Gerfried Stocker die Abteilung Ars Electronica Export. Sie unterrichtet an der Universität für Kunst und Design Linz sowie an der Paris Lodron University in Salzburg und der Donau-Universität Krems. Ihre Forschung beschäftigt sich mit Netzwerken und Wissen im Kontext von künstlerisch-wissenschaftlichen Forschungsmethoden und -praktiken. Ihr Buch "Crowd and Art - Kunst und Partizipation im Internet" wurde 2017 im transcript Verlag, Deutschland, veröffentlicht. Das Buch basiert auf ihrer Dissertation, für die sie 2016 vom Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Wirtschaft mit dem Award of Excellence ausgezeichnet wurde.
www.manuelanaveau.at 
www.crowdandart.at

Maša Jazbec (SI), is an intermedia artist, curator and academic researcher. She holds a Ph.D. in human informatics, attained at the University of Tsukuba (Empowerment Informatics program) and MA in interactive art, achieved at Interface Culture program at the University of Arts and Design Linz, Austria. She is engaged and committed to the vision and execution of the Trbovlje New Media Setting project in Slovenia, and organizes projects and events integrating science, art, technology and society at the international new media culture Speculum Artium festival. She was a visiting researcher at Ishiguro Laboratory at ATR, Kyoto in Japan. Her projects, exhibited as artworks, have always shown her understanding of new media as a research artistic practice, stemming from artistic and scientific thought, linked to the current situation in the contemporary society. Her latest research interests are mostly focused in social robotics and android science. She presented her research at conferences such as Computer Human Interaction 2016, Human Robot Interaction 2017, ISEA 2017 and System Man and Cybernetics IEEE 2017. In 2018 she was in the Prix Ars Jury for ‘Interactive Art +’ category at Ars Electronica.www.masajazbec.si

Tamiko Thiel is an internationally acknowledged pioneer in the creation of poetic spaces of memory for exploring social and cultural issues in computer based media. Her first artwork was the visual form for Danny Hillis' “Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2,”  the first commercial artificial intelligence supercomputer and in 1989 the fastest computer in the world. A CM-2 is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She began working with virtual reality in 1994 as creative director/producer of “Starbright World,” an online virtual playspace for seriously ill children (with Steven Spielberg, Starbright Foundation chairman). Her virtual reality large screen interactive projection "Beyond Manzanar" (2000, with Zara Houshmand) is in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art in Silicon Valley, and further VR projections were created with grants from the Japan Foundation, MIT, the City of Berlin and the IBM Innovation Award. She is now working with current VR technology as a GoogleVR Tilt Brush Artist in Residence. A founding member of augmented reality  artist group Manifest.AR, she participated in their path-breaking guerrilla AR intervention at MoMA NY in 2010, and was main curator/organizer of their intervention at the 2011 Venice Biennial. This led to official participation in the Istanbul Biennale and many other commissions for museums and festivals worldwide. She has been visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, UC San Diego, Bauhaus University Weimar, Berlin University of Arts and the Nanyang Technological University Singapore.
www.tamikothiel.com

Prof. Masaki Fujihata is a trailblazing media artist, renowned in Japan as well as abroad. His computergraphics work is celebrated since the 1980ies. He shifted his interest to creating 3D sculptures fromdata using 3D printing technologies in the mid 1980ies, as f.e. in his CNC-routed Geometric Love (1987)and the stereolithographic Forbidden Fruits (1989). In the mid 90ies Fujihata produced canonicalinteractive pieces such as Beyond Pages (1995-1997) and Global Interior Project (1995). His workdiscusses everything from how we interact with interfaces to the ways we might communicate in virtualspace. He also was one of the first artists to work with GPS technology and data aesthetics and is a keyfigure in the Cinema of the Future and VR/AR art and technology movement.
Prof. Masaki Fujihata’s teaching experience spans over 25 years. It includes positions as Professor andDirector of the Graduate School of Film and New Media at the Tokyo University of the Art, a GuestProfessor position at the College of Image Arts and Sciences at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, aProfessor position at the Faculty of Environmental Information at Keio University in Tokyo, as well as aGuest Professor position at Université Paris 8 in France.
Masaki Fujihata won the 1996 Golden Nica Award as well as the Award of Distinction in 2013 at the PrixArs Electronica. His 40 years of art experience has recently been published in the Masaki FujihataAnarchive 6 book series produced by Anne-Marie Duguet. This edition includes monographs by mediaart pioneers such as Antoni Muntadas, Michael Snow, Thierry Kuntzel, Jeffrey Shaw and Fujiko Nakaya.
www.anarchive.net

Dr. Victoria Vesna is an Artsist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media and Arzs and is Director of the UClA Art|Sci center. With her performative/ineractive installtions she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity dhift in relation to scientific innovation. Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nanoscientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists. Victoria has exhibited her work in 20+ solo exhibitions, 70+ group shows, has been published in 20+ papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last dacade.

victoriavesna.com

The UCLA Art|Sci Center is a bilateral exchange partner of the Interface CUltures Department.