Serena Dokuaa is a poet and AI policy expert writing about ancestry, Black womanhood, and sociotechnical analyses of AI. Her poetry can be found in the book Fake AI and in No, Dear Mag, where she also guest edited issue 32, Artifice. Her AI policy work has appeared in academic journals and publications and news media, including Politico, Meatspace Press, and Patterns.

GoldGrrl is a true Renaissance figure, a living document of diasporic artistic forms and negritude. Raised as a Panamanian folkloric dancer, she began performing at the age of five and later became deeply involved in Chicago’s underground street dance community as a b-girl. Her passion for movement led her to voguing, where she competed in ballroom and won major competitions like Midwest Awards Ball. Often, she was the only cis-woman in her category (Old Way).

As a human statue on Michigan Avenue, GoldGrrl captivated passersby with her poise and dedication, showcasing her commitment to pushing the boundaries of physical performance art. This is where the "gold" in her name originates, as she originally performed as a golden statue.

Her talents extend beyond dance and performance, as GoldGrrl thrives as a metal singer and was dubbed the "fierceness of femininity" by AfroPunk. Her lyrics address issues of racial equity, women empowerment, LGBTQIA+ rights, and immigration.

GoldGrrl has presented, exhibited, and performed her work all over Chicago including Green Mill, MCA, The Taste, iO Theater, Den Theater, and the Chicago Cultural Center. She has been interviewed on What About Chicago, Live at the Extraordinarium, Weirdos Welcome podcast, and Vocalo radio and featured on Chicago Reader's Gossip Wolf and Chicago Music Guide.

An active computer scientist, GoldGrrl examines intersections of technology and Black culture, with a particular interest in the effects of dehumanization and perceived ethnicity. Her practice reflects a broad and evolving vision of how seemingly unrelated disciplines converge to create powerful expressions of community.

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Praba Pilar is a diasporic Colombian artist and scholar creating performances, digital and electronic works, experimental talks, and scholarly writing focused on emerging technologies and social justice. Since 2020 she’s been working with artificial intelligence (AI) companions, large language models, and platforms on subversive, playful, and simultaneously serious projects challenging techno-colonialism.

Pilar’s artworks have been featured at SIGGRAPH; Facultad de Bellas Artes, Altea, Spain; TTTlabs in Crete, Greece; Vancouver's LIVE BIENNALE; Toronto's OCAD and McLuhan Center for Culture and Technology; Mexico City’s Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo; Galeria Studio Cerrillo in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas; the Museum of World Culture in Gothenberg, Sweden; the Zero One Festival at ISEA; New York City’s the Kitchen, Grace Performance Space and CUNY Graduate Center; and in California SF MOMA, Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena, SFAI, Galeria de la Raza, Los Angeles MOCA, the Oakland Museum of California and many more. She has presented her work at numerous conferences around the world, including at the Society for Literature, Science, & the Arts; the Taboo, Transgression and Transcendence in Art & Science; the College Art Association; and was a work group leader of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in the Americas Encuentros in Mexico City, Santiago, Chile, and Montreal, Canada.

Pilar’s most recent awards include the TTT Feral BioArt residency in Crete, Greece (2024), the Memes as Social Practice Residency at UC Santa Cruz (2021); the MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana Cultura Power Fellowship (2021); the Headlands Center for the Arts Community Rapid Response Award (2020); the Emeryville Community Grants Program (2019); and the California Arts Council Local Impact Award (2019). She has solo authored and co-written essays and book chapters dating back to 2001, and her work has been written about in numerous journals and books.

Pilar has a bachelor’s degree in Intermedia Arts from Mills College, and a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis. She was awarded the Davis Humanities Institute's Presidential Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities and New Media with the Hub for Innovative Exchange at the University of Winnipeg. She is presently teaching in the Critical Studies Department of California College of the Arts, and has previously taught at UC Davis, the University of Winnipeg, and the Summer Institute of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Pilar is the Co-Director of the Bioarts Ethical Advisory Kommission, an Emeritus Board Member of Women Eco Artists Dialogue, and is embarked on a long-term experimental art collaboration with Dr. Anuj Vaidya titled Larval Rock Stars.

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Kate Reed is a Boston-based designer leveraging principles of nature to build wearable technology that connects humans, computers, with the natural world.

These wearables harness human biological input and output methods through the combination of digital craft, experimental interfaces, and augmented materials.

Kate built her first wearable computer when she was 13, before the introduction of the Apple Watch. Since then, she has designed, engineered, and built over a hundred wearable computers. After becoming the first graduate of the MIT-backed NuVu Studio, Kate received dual undergraduate degrees from Brown University (Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship) and The Rhode Island School of Design (Industrial Design, Computational Technology, & Culture). She also holds Masters in Science (Computational Advanced Design ) from the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering, and Geodesy.

Kate's pioneering spirit led her to establish the Artist and Researcher in Residency program at Dassault Systemes, where she developed algorithms mirroring nature's processes, fostering predictable growth in computational spaces. Continuing her focus on integrating living organisms into technology, she created the Artist in Residency position at BosLab, employing synthetic biology to revolutionize material modification.

As a visionary technologist, Kate specializes in building machines, modifying biology, augmenting the body, and growing technology. She champions a symbiotic relationship between technology and nature, advocating for the digital evolution of the natural world, and the natural evolution of the digital world.

Her designs and inventions have been featured at the White House, New York Fashion Week, the Museum of Design Atlanta, the Hackaday Superconference, the MIT Museum, and more. Her work has been published internationally.

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Özge Samanci, a media artist and graphic novelist, is an associate professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. Her interactive installations have been exhibited internationally at venues such as Museu do Amanhã, Siggraph Art Gallery, FILE Festival, Currents New Media, The Tech Museum of Innovation, WRO Media Art Biennial, Athens International Festival of Digital Arts and New Media, Piksel Electronic Arts Festival, and ISEA.

Her graphic memoir Dare to Disappoint (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015) has been translated into six languages. Her second graphic novel, Evil Eyes Sea (Uncivilized Books, 2024), was named one of The Guardian’s best graphic novels of 2024. Her drawings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate Magazine.

Samanci has received several awards, including the Berlin Prize in 2017, when she was also the Holtzbrinck Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She was honored with the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Alumni Award (2020) from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Artist Fellowship Award in Media Arts (2023) from the Illinois Arts Council.

To learn more about Özge Samanci, click here.

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the 2021 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed Privacy Is Power (an Economist book of the year, 2020) and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. She is a member of UNESCO’s Women 4 Ethical AI, EPIC, and the Proton Foundation. She advises companies and policymakers around the world on privacy and the ethics of AI.