Say Hello to Our New Fellows!

Meet the new Fellows at ITP/IMA!

This year we launched two new Fellowship programs that we are incredibly excited about! We have invited five Red Burns Fellows to join us at ITP/IMA. Red Burns Fellows are educators, creative practitioners and researchers who will spend a full academic year teaching and working in the department. The Project Fellows are in residence this fall semester on the floor, working on a range of exciting projects with full access to all the resources at ITP. 

We are truly in awe of the range of creativity and talent the Fellows are bringing to our community. They are multidisciplinary artists, writers, curators, directors, activists and much more. We can’t wait for them to dazzle us with unique ideas, perspectives and inspiration.

Click here to take a look at our Fellowship Alumni!

Ali Santana (Red Burns Fellow 2021-2022)

Ali Santana is a multi-disciplinary artist from Brooklyn who skillfully combines creative techniques to produce a unique style of abstract storytelling that he dubs Boom Bap Cinema. Santana’s work, inspired by community, ritual, ancient technology, and Hip Hop culture utilizes video art, photography, sound design, beat-making, live performance and emerging technology to create work that touches on a range of interconnected themes including Black American culture, urban decolonization and identity. 

During his Fellowship, Santana will be experimenting with emerging technology that enables audiences and performers to collaborate on immersive, interactive performances in real-time.

Yo-Yo Lin (Red Burns Fellow 2021-2022)

Yo-Yo Lin 林友友 is an interdisciplinary media artist who explores the possibilities of self-knowledge in the context of emerging, embodied technologies. Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with chronic illness and intergenerational trauma. She creates openings into these realities in the form of spaces, performances, or tools. Her practice often facilitates sites for community-centered abundance, developing into physical and virtual media installations, workshops, access-centered nightlife parties, and artist collectives. 

During her Fellowship she seeks to investigate media-making as healing practice. She is interested in how intersectional disabled bodyminds find and create tools, performances, and spaces to heal. Where does healing reside in media-making and pedagogy? How do we approach creating artistic processes and tools that move towards minimizing harm, supporting collective care, and reclaiming what healing means for ourselves and with one another?

Sharon De La Cruz (Red Burns Fellow 2021-2022)

Sharon De La Cruz is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, and activist from NYC. Her research and practice are rooted in culturally relevant STEM pedagogy, accessible design, and social justice. She is also interested in designing stories and experiences addressing topics like environmental justice, reproductive rights, police violence, and joyful resistance. Currently, her focus is on storytelling and sequential narratives through comics. 

During her fellowship, she will engage the community in workshops and classes on storytelling, world-building practice, and visual language focused on activism and social justice.

Sara Raza (Red Burns Fellow 2021-2022)

Sara Raza is an award-winning contemporary art curator and writer. She founded the curatorial studio Punk Orientalism, which specialises in global art and visual cultures, mainly from Central and Western Asia and its international diaspora. Sara has curated numerous exhibitions for international museums, biennials and festivals, including the Guggenheim, the Rubin Museum of Art, New York; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; the 55th Venice and Tashkent Biennials; and the 3rd Baku Public Art Festival, among others. In her work at ITP/IMA, Sara is pursuing experimental projects that expands upon her research interests in global visual cultures, emergent technologies and the thinking sciences, building upon a decolonial pedagogical approach that embraces global art and technological solutions for reverse engineering oppressive anti-humancentric systems.

Tony Patrick (Red Burns Fellow 2021-2022)

Tony Patrick is a WorldBuilder, Immersive Director, and founder of the Tenfold Gaming Initiative. Patrick has authored and directed numerous screenplays, documentaries (HBO) and published comics (Batman & The Signal, X'ed). His research at ITP/IMA is centered around Co-Creation (World-building) and virtual production processes which could potentially yield more outputs such as Experiential Comics, Digital Renewal Spaces, and Culturally Abundant Programming/Initiatives.

Aarati Akkapeddi (Project Fellow Fall 2021)

Aarati Akkapeddi is an Telugu-American cross-disciplinary artist, coder, and educator, interested in the poetics and politics of datasets. They work with both personal and institutional archives in order to explore how identities and histories are shaped by different methods of collecting, preserving and presenting data. In their work, they often use family photographs and archival images as source material. They combine code, machine learning, and analogue techniques (such as photography, printmaking, & embossing) with these images to create performative rituals of information extraction.

During their fellowship, they will continue their work using Generative Adversarial Networks and their archive of family photos to produce image and video-based work. Additionally, they’ve been involved with digitizing other second/third generation immigrants' personal archives of photos here in New York, and will also consider the potential for drawing connections between different family archives.

LaJune McMillian (Project Fellow Fall 2021)

LaJuné is a Multidisciplinary Artist, and Educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination. LaJune 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.

During their time at ITP/IMA, they are continuing their work and research with The Black Movement Library(BML). BML is a library for activists, performers & artists to create diverse XR projects, a space to research how and why we move, and an archive of Black existence. BML seeks to grow community through the use of performances, XR experiences, workshops, conversations and tool making.

Kelli Anderson (Project Fellow Fall 2021)

Kelli Anderson is an artist, designer, animator, and tinkerer who pushes the limits of ordinary materials to seek out possibilities hidden in plain view. Her books and projects have included a pop-up paper planetarium, a book that transforms into a pinhole camera, a working paper record, and techniques for misusing office equipment to create animations. Intentionally lo-fi, she believes that  humble materials can provide entry into the endless, tunneling complexity of our world, making those wonders accessible on a multi-sensory, rich, human level. She is currently completing writing Alphabet in Motion, an interactive book on the relationship between typography and technology with Letterform Archive.

In her time at ITP/IMA she will further explore how paper might interact with sound to make its ways more apparent and tangible —culminating ultimately in a lo/no-fi interactive book of paper record players, radios, and instruments. Her goal is to reacquaint readers/users with the unique, embodied (and completely magical) way that our bodies “think about” the world through touch—to recognize the intelligence in our fingertips. By highlighting this aspect, which mainstream Western tech neglects, she hopes to hold up an oblique lens on what technology *could* reveal—a bridge between our physicality and the true wonders of the physical world.

Josie Williams (Project Fellow Fall 2021)

Josie Williams is an afro-nowist, creative technologist, and founder of Algorithmic Equity, an interactive digital platform that empowers any New Yorker to report, record, or respond to law enforcement behavior. She has presented her research on bias in chronic kidney disease prediction modeling at NeurIPS's Fair Health in ML workshop in Vancouver and NYC Media Lab’s Summit in 2019. In 2020, she participated in Afrotectopia’s Imagineer Fellowship and joined the NEW INC Creative Science track. She is also the Black Public Media NCU 2021 Fellow which supports her project, Ancestral Archives. Her primary interests revolve around artificial intelligence, data equity, cultivating Black radical imagination, and creating sentient-centered AI.

During her fellowship at ITP, she will be focusing on building out her project “Ancestral Archives”, which is a collection of chatbots modeled after historically-significant Black leaders designed to bring these figures back in new dimensions. The goal is to cultivate and develop a connection between the revolutionary leaders of the past and a future generation of activists and critical thinkers while also combining the learning capabilities of deep neural networks with the power of radical Black culture.