Allison de Fren is a media maker and scholar, whose work often focuses on the intersection of gender, media, and technology. Her documentaries and audiovisual essays have screened internationally at film festivals, galleries, museums, and universities, and her writing has appeared in printed and on-line journals and anthologies. She is currently a Professor in the Media Arts & Culture Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Doug creates films and interactive works investigating how technological mediation shapes truth, authenticity, and representation. His practice spans computational photography, artificial intelligence, and interactive media. Early projects include a computational novel that passes for Jane Austen but without the narrative. Recent work like “Artifact #1” transforms iconic cinema into abstract studies of light and motion, while “Nearest Neighbor” (with Rebecca Baron) explores the otherness of language, birds, and AI. With a background in experimental theater and writing, he explores “authentic synthesis” between technological possibility and human experience. He was the first Fletcher Jones Scholar of Computation at Scripps College and is a graduate of CalArts’ Experimental Writing program.

Evelyn Kreutzer is a postdoctoral researcher and video essayist/filmmaker at the Università della Svizzera italiana. She is a co-leader of the SNSF-funded research group “The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies” in Lugano and Lucerne, Switzerland, in which she focuses on AI and its impact on audiovisual memory culture. Her written and videographic work has been published in journals like NECSUS, MSMI, [in]Transition, and The Cine-Files. Her monograph Televising Taste is forthcoming with Lever Press.

Fred Grinstein is a creative executive/ media strategist based in Playa Vista, CA. With a seasoned background in premium film/ TV and new ventures in emergent technologies like AI, XR, and Web3, his goal is to build bridges between traditional content and the modern creator economy.

With two decades working in non-fiction media he is keenly focused on the intersection of authentic storytelling and new innovative emergent technologies. Grinstein is a Fellow with Starling Labs and Stanford University researching new prototypes for spatial storytelling and historical archival content via Gaussian splats. He is an Adjunct Professor at Chapman University, a top 4 Film School in the US teaching Cinematic AI. He consults with major unscripted production companies and non-fiction broadcasters like History and A&E assisting their evolutions into emergent technologies like AI. He also serves as lead instructor and co-creator for Curious Refuge’s “AI for Documentaries” online course.

He is an active member of the Los Angeles Gen AI community, he and his business partner, Minh Do co-founded the collective and creator community resource Machine Cinema that has been throwing GenJam™️ events, workshops and day-long summits in LA, SF, and NY and beyond bringing together creatives and builders as well as the AI-curious. He’s also a keynote speaker and educator having participated at major industry conferences, festivals and universities.

Previously he served as Head of Non-Fiction Programming at Steve Golin’s Anonymous Content where projects include “Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall”, directed by Erin Lee Carr for HBO, “At the Ready” from filmmaker Maisie Crow, (2021 Sundance), and “Murders Before the Marathon” a 3×60 for Hulu. As an independent, he recently served as Consulting Producer on “How I Faked My Life with AI” (2024 Tribeca Film Fest), “Hidden Letters” directed by Violet du Feng (Oscar’s shortlist 2023), and Executive Producer on “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power” co-directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Sam Pollard (2022 Tribeca Film Fest).

Grinstein was VP of Development during the launch of Viceland, collaborating with the youth-skewing digital publishing team and Creative Director Spike Jonze; projects include ”Weediquette”, ”Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia”,and Ondi Timoner’s “Jungletown“. He was also a Senior Director of Programming at A&E for 5 years where he was responsible for hit series “Storage Wars”, ”Dogs of War”, ”Dog the Bounty Hunter”, “Crazy Hearts: Nashville”, and ”Psychic Kids”. Prior to network life, his early producing credits include Discovery’s “Cash Cab”, PBS’s “History Detectives” and Bravo’s “Make Me a Supermodel”.

Holly Willis is the Chair of the Media Arts + Practice Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and she studies reconfigurations of cinema and experimental media. She also co-directs the AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS) initiative of the USC Center for Generative AI and Society and is a hybrid scholar/practitioner integrating critical theory and media production primarily using video, still images, and sound as forms of critical making. She is the author of Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts; New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image; and Bjork Digital, and the co-founder of Filmmaker Magazine dedicated to independent film, and former editor of RES Magazine and co-curator of RESFEST and Flux Festival. She writes frequently for diverse publications about experimental film, video, and new media, and her work has appeared in publications such as Film Comment, Afterimage, Variety and The Normal School.

Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker and media researcher who has produced nearly 400 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning Transformers: The Premake introduced the “desktop documentary” format. His work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Berlinale, and International Film Festival Rotterdam, as well as websites such as The New York Times and Mubi. He is the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). He co-leads the Swiss National Science Foundation research project “The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies.” His new feature film “Afterlives” screened at BFI London Film Festival and DocLisboa International Film Festival.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist exploring social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She creates performances inviting viewers to engage. To remote control her dates. To be followed. To welcome her in as their human smart home. To attend a party hosted by artificial intelligence. Lauren is the creator of p5.js, an open-source creative coding platform that prioritizes inclusion and access with over 5 million users worldwide. She is also Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. Lauren’s work has been recognized by Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA Art+Tech Lab, Sundance, Eyebeam, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, and Ars Electronica, among others.

Nik Kleverov is a pioneering storyteller and thought leader making history with many firsts in AI. He is Chief Creative Officer of Native Foreign, a renowned agency celebrated for its innovative approach to brand storytelling. His career has taken him from creating iconic title sequences (Netflix’s Narcos) to viral commercial work, including the first ever AI brand film (for Toys”R”Us). Nik’s work highlights his expertise in merging creativity with technology. He is also a public speaker who has become a leading voice on how AI is reshaping the future of storytelling.

Ranu Mukherjee works in film installation, painting and performance to cultivate an ecological, somatic, feminist and multidimensional perspective, connecting experiences of time, rupture, energy and futurity with the intention to work against exhaustion. She has presented solo exhibitions at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Tarble Art Center, Charleston, IL, the San Jose Museum of Art and Gallery Wendi Norris, who published her first monograph ‘Shadowtime’ in 2021. Recent film installations have been presented by Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022-2023, the 2019 Karachi Biennale and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mukherjee co-founded the artist avatar 0rphan drift in London 1994. ‘Score for Transitional Times’, her most recent production with choreographer Hope Mohr, premiered at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in January 2025. Mukherjee is the dean of the School of Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts.

Shane Denson is Professor of Film and Media Studies and, by Courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication at Stanford University, where he also serves as Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to media arts, film, digital media, and serialized popular forms. He collaborates with Karin Denson on generative media art projects and is a founding member of the non/phenomenal collective. He is the author of Bride of Frankenstein [film|minutes](Lever Press, 2025), Post-Cinematic Bodies (meson press, 2023), Discorrelated Images (Duke University Press, 2020) and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript-Verlag, 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (REFRAME Books, 2016). See shanedenson.com for more information.

Steve Anderson is a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, history, technology and culture. He is currently a Professor of Digital Media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. He is the author of Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images (MIT 2017) and Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Dartmouth 2011) and co-editor of the anthology Reclaiming Popular Documentary (Indiana 2021). Anderson is also a video essayist, immersive media designer and founder of the appropriation-friendly public media archive Critical Commons.