Menu
Menu
In 2020, Black Public Media (BPM), MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL), and MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (MIT CAST) created the MIT & Black Public Media Visiting Artist Program to support Black creatives who use emerging technology as their medium for documentary and nonfiction storytelling. Typically, our participants are filmmakers, artists, journalists, or creative technologists. The mission of this joint program is to support and develop the emerging-tech storytelling skills of makers who are underrepresented within creative technology industries and to bring visiting artists into community with like-minded storytellers.
Program Year: 2022
Country: USA
Project: AR Museum for the People: A Black Panther Mural Tour
About the Nonso Christian Ugbode Digital Media Fellowship
The NCU Emerging Media Fellowship was founded in 2016 to commemorate the contributions of Nonso Christian Ugbode, BPM’s first director of digital initiaties. The fellowship is designed specifically for young artists who are producing their first independent digital media project. Funding for the 2023 NCU Fellowship is provided by Gimlet Media.
Black Public Media (BPM) and the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts are collaborators on a residency for independent filmmakers, creative technologists and artists who need access to emerging-tech equipment, studio time or workspace. The in-person residency was launched on the campus of University of Nebraska-Lincoln during the summer of 2022. Emerging technologies include, but are not limited to, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, robotics, and 3D printing. Candidates may also choose to focus on older technologies, such as projection mapping, multichannel video, VFX, or 3D animation. Residency funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Johnny Carson Foundation.
Eboni was most recently on crew for HBO’s Mare of Easttown. She has been an active Sundance Collab Community Leader. Her work with EZ Exposures (her boutique photography company) has recently been seen on NBC10 and President Joe Biden’s Instagram. She is also a member of Councilman Isaiah Thomas’s Arts & Culture Taskforce.
Currently, Eboni writing and producing films and various media projects via her production company, Pearl’s Girl Productions.
Based in Los Angeles, Ainslee Robson is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer, and media artist who crafts emancipatory narratives and worlds. She is a Sundance Interdisciplinary “Art of Practice” Fellow (2021-2022) and Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellow (2022-2023). With a BA in philosophy and MA in fiction and entertainment, Ainslee focuses on narratives that deconstruct hierarchy and colonial legacies using emerging technologies in digital art and film. She developed an experimental visual language for reconstructing memory in the afrosurreal experience “Ferenj: A Graphic Memoir in VR,” which premiered at Tribeca, and was awarded the Special Jury Prize at NewImages in Paris. Robson’s commissions and collaborations have been exhibited by IDEAL Barcelona, Zurcher Hochschule De Kunste, Forum de Images, Institue für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), and MoMA New York, respectively.
Dominick is an artist, teacher, writer, producer, director, and general maker of things. His work seeks to link and explain the fragmented sections of his unique life and experiences. Much of his worldview was shaped by his status as a first-generation immigrant, survivor of childhood trauma, and having grown up in a deeply conservative Christian household.
His processes were shaped by 12 years of experience working as an IT specialist for the US government. Combine these off with natural inclinations towards technology, video games, biology, music, and art education; at the intersection of all these points, you get Dominick’s artistic practice. First and foremost, his art attempts to create a language or system wherein he can compartmentalize all of his competing inspirations. Allowing these a space to inform and interact with one another serves as his greatest catalyst for creative inspiration and evolution.
LaJuné (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, and educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our contemporary forms of communication.
They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination. LaJuné believes in making by diving into, navigating, critiquing, and breaking systems and technologies that uphold systemic injustices to decommodify our bodies, undo our indoctrination, and make room for different ways of being. Previously, they were the director of skating at Figure Skating in Harlem, where they integrated STEAM and Figure Skating to teach girls of color about movement and technology. They have continued their research on Blackness, movement, and technology during residencies and fellowships at the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, NYU ITP, Barbarian Group, and Barnard College.
Carla LynDale Bishop is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor in the Sidney Poitier New American Film School at Arizona State University. Her work explores ways that media can be used to bring communities together and promote social change. She blends traditional documentary with immersive media such as augmented reality and 360 video to tell place-based counter-narratives of historically black communities. She produced the Augmented reality documentary, Freedman Town 2.0, which utilizes image-based and location-based points in order to celebrate the life and history of black communities in Denton, Texas.
Currently she is producing an immersive geo-locative media project titled, “Mapping Blackness”. This digital mapping platform chronicles historically black communities that are often left off of maps utilizing geotagging, Augmented Reality, 360 video, data visualization and traditional documentary storytelling. “Mapping Blackness” is a continuation of previous projects and aims to put more black communities on the map using ArcGIS technologies and co-creation methodologies between community members, technologists, students, and filmmakers.
Carla received her BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Chicago and her MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University in Philadelphia. In 2013, she founded, Focused.Arts.Media.Education., an organization that trains youth how to make media that matters in their communities through in-school residencies, summer workshops and community-wide documentary projects.
Fabiano Mixo is a Brazilian artist and filmmaker. Founder and creative director of VILD Studio, a new production company specialized in film productions and contemporary narratives including immersive and interactive experiences (XR), games and multimedia installations.
He studied New Media Art at EAV Parque Lage and Film & Communication Studies at PUC University in Rio de Janeiro. In Berlin he concluded his studies in Filmmaking at FilmArche and attended courses of the Art and Media Program at Berlin University of Arts. Prior residencies include Oculus Creators Lab 2.0 in Los Angeles and Berlinale Talents 2020 in Berlin.
In the past years Mixo’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including film festivals such as Tribeca, Melbourne, Torino, New Orleans, Aesthetica, IndieLisboa, Slamdance and São Paulo Internacional Film Festival. Digital art exhibitions also include festivals and events such as Siggraph, EVA, EMAF, Lumen Prize, Transmission Athens-Karlsruhe, Cairo Video Festival and Videoformes.
In 2017 he had his first solo at Museum of Arts and Technology Oi Futuro in Rio de Janeiro and, more recently, an exhibition at National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta.
Mixo has been working across film, virtual reality, interactive storytelling and new media art. His art practice explores the boundaries of contemporary identities and memory, narrative re-appropriation and perspective games. He is constantly researching experimental forms of documentary.
Andrea “Philly” Walls is a multidisciplinary artist, informed and inspired by the writers and visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement. She is the founder of Museum of Black Joy and among the first cohort of artists to be designated as Philadelphia Cultural Treasures. She is pleased that her writing, scholarship, and visual art have been supported by organizations she admires, including the Leeway Foundation, VONA/Voices Workshops for Writers of Color; Black Public Media; MIT Open Documentary Lab, Hedgebrook Residencies for Women Authoring Change; The Colored Girls Museum; Writers Room at Drexel University; The Studio Museum of Harlem; The Women’s Mobile Museum, Eastern State Penitentiary; Mural Arts Philadelphia; and FabYouth Philly. In addition to The Museum of Black Joy, Andrea is the creator and curator of The D’Archive.com, author of the poetry chapbook, Ultraviolet Catastrophe (Thread Makes Blanket Press) and the digital web-collection, The Black Body Curve. com. She finds joy in the small things.
Co-founder of OYA Media Group, Sierra Leonean-Canadian Ngardy Conteh George is a two-time Canadian Screen Award winning filmmaker. She is committed to working with systematically excluded, and often unheard communities, especially those that represent the rich cultures and complexities of the African diaspora. Most recently, she directed, co-wrote and co-produced TV hour Mr. Jane and Finch (CBC, 2019), winner of two 2020 Canadian Screen Awards.
Kidus’ design merges the boundaries between spatial practice and futures informed by Africa and its diasporic conditions. With a background in architecture and speculative world-building,his works focus on the hybrid nature of reimagining transcontinental archives to form counter-narratives of Black consciousness. In the past, Kidus has collaborated with international artists and institutes including Studio Other Spaces, Studio Olafur Eliasson, Forum des Images, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), and Contemporary And (C&). As a former EDGE fellow at SCI-Arc, he holds an MA in fiction and entertainment. In 2022, Kidus co-founded Guada Labs an art, film, and new media practice based in Los Angeles.
Damien is a creative technologist, digital archivist, and augmented reality (AR) artist and developer from Oakland, California. He is the founder of Black Terminus AR, a camera app and augmented reality art studio in your pocket that helps bring archives to life. His mission is to keep redlining out of the metaverse by developing and inspiring the next generation of Black creative technologists to use culture and art as a way into creative tech.
Ethel (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) was named an NCU Fellow in 2024. She is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator and creative researcher exploring memory in Africa and its diaspora. Image-making, storytelling, and time-traveling compose the framework of her inquiry. From collage to moving image, Ethel examines space and time-based technologies often from a speculative lens. Her burgeoning curatorial practice took form in an inaugural exhibition titled ‘African Ancient Futures,’ and continues to expand in myriad audiovisual experiments. Ethel is a recipient of the Magnum Foundation 2022 Counter Histories Grant-Program for her project “Image Frequency Modulation,” which was also recently selected by the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2023 DocLab Forum.
Georgiana was named an NCU Fellow in 2023. At the time, she was a junior at Alabama A&M University studying Computer Science with a background in machine learning, where she has interned at companies like Rockstar Games, Apple, and Activision. She will be an incoming Microsoft Research intern where she will focus on building applications in creative AI and was a previous Black Ambition Prize HBCU Winner. Outside of machine learning, she is a co-founder for Squidpunk, a collaborative studio focused on creating diverse animated and interactive experiences, and co-producer for Howard University’s Film Organization upcoming anthology series “Where’s Everybody At?” (2023). You can find her replaying her favorite video games and reading fanfiction about her favorite characters.
Blanca was named an NCU Fellow in 2022. At the time, she was a graduating senior International Studies major attending Spelman College. Throughout her matriculation through Spelman, she was able to explore how her love of storytelling, art, and creating communities could come together in a way that she could make a career. She is the founder and CEO of Culturally Kreative a publishing company that focuses on bringing emerging technologies to young readers. As a result of her work creating Culturally Kreative, she has been accepted as a fellow for Spelman College’s inaugural Entrepreneurship Fellowship and the Black Girl Venture NextGen Fellowship.
Josie was named an NCU Fellow in 2021. She is a multimedia creative technologist whose practice involves experimenting with emerging technology, coding, and exploring cyborgian art forms as a medium of expression. She is influenced by radical techno-counterculture and technology as a liberatory tool based in indigenous knowledge. Black Public Media awarded her the 2021 Nonso Christian Ugbode Fellowship.
Kian was named an NCU Fellow in 2020. An activist at heart and artist by trade, his focus resides at the intersection of storytelling, social justice and technology. As the founder and leader of RXNIN LIFE, an independent production house, Kian’s work is diverse, ranging from music, to films, comics and AR/VR. His most notable work is his photography of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement in Washington, DC, which was featured in the Washington Post and auctioned off for the VTF NABJ scholarship fund. He has spoken on several panels addressing diversity, social justice, storytelling and technology, including at BPM’s 2022 Black Media Story Summit on Vaccine Equity in Baltimore; and the 2020 Consumer Electronic Symposium in Las Vegas. He taught workshops for Johns Hopkins’ Baltimore Youth Film Arts program and The University of Maryland’s Jimenez-Porter Writers’ House while finishing production on his docutrilogy “Free The People.” As a Saul Zaentz Fellow and an honorary BPM 360+ Incubator fellow, Kian was awarded the inaugural BPM Nonso Christian Ugbode Digital Media fellowship to complete an AR demo of his comic book, “BLACKGUARD.”
Conrad is an educator, and media maker from Buffalo, NY. His works include short documentaries, and episodic doc series, exploring artistic practice and history. His work is included in the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s collection of Buffalo Artists, and Termite TV and has screened on BPTM and WHYY. He is a production facilitator with the Precious Places Project, and works as an educator and facilitator with Scribe Video Center, PhillyCAM, and WHYY.
J. Bird Lathon is a multidisciplinary artist, designer and filmmaker. He has created logos, original typefaces, sportswear, motion graphics, animated sequences, and books. As a filmmaker, he is interested in a cinema of artists, outcasts, eccentrics, and iconoclasts who are aesthetically irreverent, innovative and informative. His shorts, The Process and Ms. Right Now (2001), received a Special Acknowledgement at the 2002 Black International Cinema Festival in Berlin. His short, Numbers From A Montgomery Jail (2007), a poetic account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, premiered at the 2007 Nashville Film Festival. His latest, Impaled & Inhaled (2020), uses his personal photographs and original poetry to relate his experiences about the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center and was conceived during his first Artist In Residency at Hastings College. He is currently creative producing To The Fireflies , the feature debut of award-winning documentary filmmaker Kerri Gawryn, which in its development stage and was accepted into Sundance Co//ab programs for producing and directing actors in 2020.
Johannes Barfield is an interdisciplinary sample-based visual and sound artist who works in installation, video, photography, extended reality (XR), collage, sound, and music. His work explores childhood memories, joy, and appropriation as a means for survival, the restitution of artifacts, extinction, and the music played at family cookouts. He was born and raised in Winston-Salem, N.C., and received his MFA in photography and film from Virginia Commonwealth University. He resides in Albuquerque, N.M., where he is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the honors college department at the University of New Mexico.
