About Scarlet Kim

(she/her) – Los Angeles, CA, USA – Creative Producer & Director. Hosted by Stanford Arts.

Scarlett Kim is an artist and creative producer making unclassifiable experiences at the intersection of live performance and immersive technology.  

Scarlett is co-founder and Executive Creative Producer of Center for Unclassifiable Technologies & Experiences (C.U.T.E.). Scarlett serves as Head of Innovation with Culture House Immersive, an entertainment studio building best-in-class immersive experiences, sustainable revenue for artists, and a distribution ecosystem across location-based and XR platforms.  

Recently, Scarlett collaborated with Chloé Zhao and Book of Shadows; co-founded Worlds in Play, a gathering of game and theatre artists exploring agency (ASU Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center); and produced Live Arts Exchange [LAX] Festival (Los Angeles Performance Practice) with partners including REDCAT, MOCA, and LA Dance Project. 

As Director of Innovation and Strategy of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Scarlett led the transmedia department of the largest repertory theatre in the US, helming bold new works of theatre across meatspace and the metaverse. Scarlett’s innovation leadership has been featured at cross-industry platforms including SXSW, SIGGRAPH, AWE, USITT and Immersive Experience Institute. Previously, Scarlett was co-founder and Artistic Director of The Mortuary, performance laboratory for unclassifiable experiments. At CultureHub, global art and technology community founded by La MaMa and SeoulArts, Scarlett oversaw artistic programming of the LA studio. Other highlights of Scarlett’s 10+ year journey as an artist and leader include collaborations with REDCAT, East West Players, Prague Quadrennial, Korea Foundation, and Chilean National Council of Culture & Arts. MFA, Directing, CalArts. BA, Theatre & Performance Studies and Visual Arts, University of Chicago. 

About Stephen

(he/they) – London, UK – Director and Theatre Maker. Hosted by TORCH – The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, Humanities Division, University of Oxford.

Stephen is an award-winning director and theatre maker whose practice extends from digital work to the West End. Currently the Artistic Lead of NPO Vital Xposure, making innovative and political disabled-led work, Stephen won the 2022 Royal Theatrical Support Trust Sir Peter Hall Directors Award for their first mainstage show The Real and Imagined History of the Elephant Man at Nottingham Playhouse, Belgrade Coventry and Blackpool Grand. They have been a staff director at the National Theatre, resident assistant director at Chichester Festival Theatre and resident director for the European Theatre Convention. 

Other work includes the Offie nominated Surfacing and Little Echoes; a residency with Barbican Open Lab; and collaboration with theatres including the Young Vic, Royal Court, Kiln, Half Moon, Finborough, Graeae and Camden People’s Theatre. Stephen is a two-time finalist for the Genesis Future Directors’ Award and have been funded by Arts Council England, Unlimited, Jerwood and Romilly Walton Masters Award. They read History at Cambridge specialising in gender theory and political thought, and trained at LAMDA, with the Young Vic, and Royal Shakespeare Company. 

As a creative producer Stephen has worked on the multi-award-winning It’s a Motherf**king Pleasure, which recently transferred to Soho Playhouse New York and the sell-out national tour of That’s Not My Name. Much of Stephen’s work has involved collaboration with a cross-section of disabled artists and a creative foregrounding of the potential of access. 

Tabitha Jackson

(she/her) – Curious Cultural Leader – Connecticut/New York, USA. Hosted by
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio.

Tabitha Jackson is an arts advocate and consultant who has spent the last 30 years supporting the independent voice, championing the social and cultural power of artful cinema, and furthering the mission of uplifting a more expansive set of makers, audiences, and forms. In 2020, as the first woman and person of colour to be appointed Director of Sundance Film Festival she re-imagined and led two technologically innovative and radically accessible pandemic editions which “expanded the possibilities of what a film festival can be, and who it can be for.” Between 2013 and 2020 she headed the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program rethinking traditional project support in favor of more artist-centered models, and advocating for more institutional support of formal innovation in nonfiction cinema. In the UK Tabitha worked at BBC Television as a producer/director, at Channel 4 as Commissioning Editor for Arts and Performance, and Executive Producer of bold theatrical documentaries for Film4 including 20,000 Days on Earth (Iain and Jane), The Arbor (Clio Barnard), The Imposter (Bart Layton), The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes) and Dreams of a Life (Carol Morley). Tabitha is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and served for 6 years on the Documentary Branch Executive Committee. She was also a 2024 Shorenstein Film Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and, somewhat randomly, author of The Boer War. She is a passionate believer in the power of meaning-making, and in the vital role of the arts as a transformative public good. 

About Nami Weatherby

(she/her) – Los Angeles, CA, USA – Sound artist/musician, multimedia producer, creative researcher. Hosted by The Music Center.

Nami is a musician/sound artist, multimedia producer, and creative researcher whose work considers relationships between the fluid circulation of stories, social imagination, and survival in contexts of asymmetrical power. She is interested in exploring the potential of aurality to displace the distortive visual frame and articulate an alternative, multiplicitous sense of self and place. Her multimedia sound installation they never told us these things has been exhibited in New York, Seoul, and Kyoto and illuminates the under-considered intimacies between peoples touched by a global network of nuclear violence. The piece synthesizes aurality, visuality, and movement in ways that—like radiation itself—are boundless and diffuse, making audible relationalities that exist beyond the material.   

As a creative researcher and producing fellow in Digital Innovation at The Music Center, Nami collaborated with Kamal Sinclair to develop the Black Bar Social, a monthly immersive experience and speakeasy-style social gathering designed to spark public imagination and catalyze conversations about the future of culture in LA. The price of admission is simply to receive a question from the provocateur of the evening. An artist, culture-maker, or community partner installs a creative immersive experience that renders glimpsable cutting-edge innovations of our time in science, technology, culture, social movements, and the possibility of greater well-being. It is a place to socialize ideas, make decisions, and nurture relationships that bring them to life. As part of a more expansive creative archive, Nami collaborates with filmmaker Janice Duncan on an experimental podcast centering conversations with the provocateur and attendees of the Black Bar Social. 

About Janice Duncan

(she/her, they/them) – Los Angeles, CA, USA – Creative Producer, Filmmaker, Independent Researcher. Hosted by The Music Center.

Janice Duncan is an Academy Award-nominated creative producer, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist from Detroit, MI. She earned her MFA in Film and TV Production from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and her BS in Film and Media Studies from Johns Hopkins University. Janice was a 2018 Sundance New Frontier Programs fellow, a 2019 MacDowell interdisciplinary fellow, and a 2019 UC Davis Feminist Research Institute Visiting Scholar Program fellow. As the producer of the experimental documentary short A Love Song For Latasha, she received a 2021 Academy Award nomination. Through a collaboration with Netflix, the first Latasha Harlins mural was created in South Central Los Angeles on her childhood playground. 

As an artist and independent researcher, Janice is currently working on an audio-based creative archive with The Los Angeles Music Center and The Royal Shakespeare Company that examines the future of culture, technology, and performance in Los Angeles. 

About Jemma Desai

(she/her) – London, UK – Artist/Cultural Worker. Hosted by BAM.

Jemma Desai is a cultural worker across film, visual arts and performance and a somatic facilitator working with individuals and groups. Her work attempts a committed engagement with decolonial and abolitionist scholarship and praxis and through this, considers the gap between intention and practice in imagining, making, and circulating culture. Working through, or close to the body, her work encompasses first person writing and performance, as well as material and social practices to form an embodied archive of desires for change, belonging, and being longing. She is a practice-based PhD candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama with a thesis entitled “what do we want from each other after we have told our stories?”. The title gestures towards the proliferation of personal testimony in cultural production and the contested, yet always entangled relationship between individual and collective in movements of social change. 

About Amy Rose

(she/her) – Bristol, UK – Artistic Director / Curator. Hosted by Watershed.

Amy Rose is a highly acclaimed director and maker, known for creating sensory stories that experiment with new technologies. In all her work, she seeks innovative methods for creating connection with audiences, playing with the body as much as speaking to the mind.  

In 2013, together with May Abdalla she co-founded Anagram, to explore the use of emerging immersive technologies and audience participation in non-fiction storytelling. Their work has spanned many forms, from a blindfolded experience about being lost that took place in a giant sensory set to a VR piece about power and control for two people at a time, to numerous interactive pieces for museums and public space. Anagram have won multiple international awards for their striking and profound approach to storytelling and toured work internationally at festivals, public spaces and museums. 

In 2024, Amy left Anagram to conceive, develop and curate the first immersive gallery at Watershed, in Bristol, UK. Undershed is a new space for showing immersive and interactive stories. You might explore a virtual fantasy, get lost in a world of 3D sound, or head out beyond the building, with a voice guiding your feet along city streets made unfamiliar. It will be an important home for sharing the work of brilliant artists from all over the world who are inventing this new art form.  

Originally a documentary filmmaker with an MFA in directing from Edinburgh College of Art, she also runs wild camps for children and is on the core team of an annual music festival in Wales, running since 2010. 

About Akhila Krishnan

(she/her) – Hastings, East Sussex, UK – Creative Director and Designer. Hosted by the RSC.

Akhila Krishnan is a creative director and designer working at the forefront of technology and visual storytelling today. She has over 15 years of experience working internationally in live performance & events, theatre, opera, projection mapping, installation, exhibition, virtual reality, augmented reality, television, live broadcast, short film, illustration, and graphic narrative. Akhila is interested in the possibilities that technology offers to take narrative and storytelling beyond the screen, bringing it into lived spaces via shared experiences. Her practice moves between the material and immaterial, between the digital and tactile – seeking new connections and resonances between them.  

Her work has recently been nominated at the Drama Desk Awards, International Opera Awards, the Novellos, What’s on Stage Awards and Broadway World UK awards. Over the course of her career, she has also received several other honors including the Inlaks Shivadasani Scholarship, Man Group Drawing Prize and the IDPA Silver Prize.  

During her time at 59 Productions, she was a core part of the Tony and Olivier Award winning design team that worked on the musical An American in Paris. She was also Senior Designer on Grenfell: Our Home, Channel 4’s first VR documentary, that won awards at the Sheffield and Raindance Film Festival.  

Akhila graduated from the Royal College of Art, receiving a distinction for her MA thesis. She received her BA from the National Institute of Design in India, during which time she was an exchange student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. 

About Amahra Spence

(she/her) – Birmingham, UK – Interdisciplinary cultural worker, performance artist and curator. Hosted by
TORCH – The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, Humanities Division, University of Oxford.

Amahra Spence is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, convener, strategist, systems designer and spatial practitioner. Inspired by social sculpture, her practice is rooted in infrastructure building, spatialising dream work, regenerative resource redistribution and platforming radical imagination as tactics for emancipation from systems of violence. She is most passionate about co-creating worlds and architectures that safeguard the resistance, joy and collective imagination of oppressed peoples globally.

As Founding Director of MAIA (2013) and Organiser of The Black Land & Spatial Justice Project (2020), she leads teams engaging culture, land and the politics of space to build real-time strategies for Black liberation. This includes Land Black, a research and speculative design studio prototyping anti-carceral architectural and land-based strategies. Amahra also pioneered Yard (2020), turning a residential townhouse into a neighbourhood site of imagination, artist residency space and community hub. She is currently working to create Abuelos, an artist-led hotel and cultural space, grown from the spirit of Grandad’s house.

Engaging the transformation of systems as cultural work, Amahra has developed performance art, curated multimedia work, designed civic infrastructure and also published writing on the politics of the British land system, migrant resistance, Afroecology, hip hop and architecture, legacies of community infrastructure building, the future of hospitality, speculative urban planning, alternative arts education and life-affirming economics.