CultureHub Announces ITP Alum Melanie Hoff & Adjunct Tommy Martinez as Resident Artists for 2025-2026

Serving as a catalyst for risk-taking and discovery, CultureHub’s Residency Program supports artists creating work through experimentation with emerging technologies. Resident Artists have full access to space, technical support, and other creative resources with an opportunity to present works-in-progress, teach workshops, develop their curatorial practices, and connect with other artists in the CultureHub network.

This fall, CultureHub will develop and present new works by their 2025-2026 resident artists: Kathy Wu, ITP Adjunct Tommy Martinez, Ivana Dama, Herdimas Anggara, ITP Alum and Adjunct Melanie Hoff, and Maryam Kazeem in NYC and Estavan Carlos Benson, Arabelle Sicardi, Rob Ray, and Tahj Lakey & James Quash Stevens in LA.

Click here to read about this year's residents and see below for profiles on Melanie and Tommy.

Melanie Hoff is an artist, educator, technologist, and organizer working within spaces of hacking and performance. Their work cultivates spaces of learning and collective reflection grounded in honesty, poetry, and reconciliation for how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. Melanie teaches about art, sex, technology, design, and social cybernetics at Harvard, NYU, and Yale. Their work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, and elsewhere. They co-direct Hex House, an art space they co-founded in Brooklyn, and formerly co-directed the School for Poetic Computation where they often can be found teaching material they’re endlessly inspired by.

“At CultureHub, I will deepen my work on Dance Poem Revolution, an interactive installation where participants generate poems through movement. Using a custom-built system inspired by and reimagined from the popular game Dance Dance Revolution. The piece generates writing sourced from revolutionary texts, songs, and local histories in response to players’ steps. The project explores how critical theory can be part of an embodied, poetic, joyful, and communal storytelling. Materials generated through workshops will feed back into the game, adding original text and video sources so that the game is shaped by each place it is installed and those who engage with it.”

— Melanie Hoff

Tommy Martinez is an artist and programmer working through research, sound and code. He creates software and musical systems for the internet, custom electronic hardware, and for live multichannel performance. As a musician, Tommy has performed music at MoMA PS1, The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Fridman Gallery, Rhizome, and Pioneer Works. He has lectured on sound and electronic art at School for Poetic Computation, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University.

“Distant Streams is a telematic performance for two improvisers located in separate yet identical multichannel sound environments. Web technology developed during the residency enables the real-time merging of spatial audio mixes performed by each soloist. Audiences at both locations experience a shared, immersive sound-work shaped by both improvisers. Online listeners, connected via web browser, hear the combined mixes through their own hi-fi surround systems or headphones. This work explores new opportunities for remote collaboration and the possibility of distant multichannel performance.”

— Tommy Martinez