Brilliant People Recommendations
People often reach out asking if I have any recommendations of artists, educators, technologists, thinkers, and designers who might be good fits for their panels, workshops, events, interviews. Below is a non-exhaustive list of some folks who I know personally and wholeheartedly recommend.
People with asterisks* next to their names are also educators. You can request them to teach classes, but they may already have full time gigs.
This list is still under construction; there are many more who should be on it who I just haven’t yet had the time to add.
Credit: Pavel Ezrohi
Artists | Designers I
Folks who are thinking about technology, legibilility, and categorization in ways that are interesting, expansive, holistic.
Jina Valentine*
Mother Cyborg
Mendi + Keith Obadike*
Ari Melenciano*
Morehshin Allahyari*
Kelly Walters *
Lauren Lee McCarthy *
Stephanie Dinkins *
Sarah Hendren*
Artists | Designers II
Folks who are exploring all the places where the personal meets the political meets the complex meets the capacious meets so much more. These aren't folks with explicit tech/data/media focuses, but similar themes come up in their work.
Anaïs Duplan *
Complex Movements
Macon Reed*
Okwui Okpokwasili
Mato Aho Collective
Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross
Thinkers | Designers | Space
Folks using space as a way to consider so much more, from Blackness to collective possibilities
Zara Rahman*
Jess Myers
Romi Morrison
Ingrid Burrington*
Web3 and Generative Artists
Emily Xie
Sam Hart
Creative Organizer-Artists
Organizational Bio
Mimi Onuoha has worked as a pioneering artist, educator, and researcher within the fields of tech advocacy and data-driven criticism for close to a decade. As an artist, her projects frequently involve working with teams of community members to make datasets and investigate complex technical realities in ways that are engaging and surprising, with a focus on the ways that the treatment of marginalized groups reveal dominant structures. Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in places as varied as La Gaitê Lyrique (France), FIBER Festival (Netherlands), Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (China), Le Centre Pompidou (France), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (USA), the Carnegie Museum of Art (USA), The Photographer’s Gallery (UK), and Arthouse Foundation (Nigeria, upcoming). In 2014 she was selected to be in the inaugural class of Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellows, in 2018-19 she served as the inaugural Creative-in-Residence at Olin College of Engineering, and she has served as a jury for art prizes and residencies like the Interaction Design Awards, Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, and Mozilla Foundation (upcoming). Her work has been covered in publications like the New York Times, HyperAllergic, WIRED, VICE, AIGA, the New York Times Magazine, Fast Forward, and The San Francisco Chronicle. She is on the Brooklyn Public Library’s Arts & Letters Committee.
Onuoha is a seasoned educator and writer. She has taught in libraries and community groups, as well as in graduate and undergraduate departments at Bennington College, New York University, and Olin College for Engineering on subjects ranging from creative programming to tech policy and art creation. As a writer, her articles have appeared in publications like Columbia University’s Tow Center, National Geographic, Quartz, FiveThirtyEight, K Verlag Press, and MIT Press (upcoming) and she has been in residence at NYU, the Royal College of Art, Data & Society Research Institute, Studio XX (Montreal), Pioneer Works, and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
Mimi’s artistic contributions to the tech field open new perspectives of thinking about what is believed to be possible. She works across different fields and disciplines to create projects that use technology in concrete ways to highlight different ways of considering the world that always bring more power to those who lack it.