Anne Burdick is a regular participant in the international dialogue regarding the future of graduate education and research in design. She designs experimental text projects in diverse media and participates in the nascent field of the Digital Humanities. BFA, MFA, graphic design, California Institute of the Arts. micromegameta.net

Hans Baumann is a Swiss-American artist and land art practitioner. His work is informed by extensive research in evolutionary dynamics and human geography, as well as his longstanding interest in geological phenomena and nonhuman timescales. Baumann holds degrees from Harvard University and Prifysgol Caerdydd and has lectured at a number of institutions, including the Universität Bern Institute of Art History, Harvard University and the University of Washington College of Built Environment. His projects and essays have been published in a variety of periodicals, including The Stranger, Diacritics and SciArt Magazine, and he has received grant and project support from institutions such as 4Culture, Cornell University's Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, the Landscape Research Group and the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Jessica Bellamy tells visual stories using data and personal narratives. As a Design Justice advocate, Jessica started her design career working with nonprofits and community groups to create compelling explainers that break down complex service and policy information. In 2015, she created a small design agency called GRIDS: The Grassroots Information Design Studio in Louisville, KY. In 2017, she created a hands-on workshop called Infographics for Social Change: A Graphic Ally Hackathon. Since then, she has given Graphic Ally Hackathons at several conferences and at three major universities (Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, and Yale). The hackathon focuses on teaching creatives how to make information graphics in partnership with nonprofits. She is also the creator of the Infographic Wheel. The Infographic Wheel is a handheld design tool that helps creatives select a visual layout for any dataset.

John Carpenter is an interactive digital artist and designer whose work explores the use of gesture with complex data and spaces. Based in Los Angeles, he works for Oblong Industries as an interaction designer and is a visiting professor at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, MA+P. John earned his MFA from the department of Design Media Arts at UCLA (thesis: qualitative spaces in interactive art + design, 2009) and has recently exhibited work at INHORGENTA MUNICH, the LA Arboretum, the Murmuration Festival, Young Projects, ACME. Los Angeles, and the Academy Awards.

Jeremiah Chiu is a graphic designer, artist, and musician living in Los Angeles. From 2008 to 2016 Jeremiah served as co-founder and principal of Plural, an award-winning and internationally recognized creative studio. Jeremiah's current studio practice, Some All None, is an extension of the practice he founded at Plural. Additionally, Jeremiah serves as a design/strategy lead at IN-FO.CO (formerly Project Projects). Most recently, Jeremiah led the exhibition and identity design in collaboration with IN-FO.CO for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Samantha Culp is a Los Angeles-based writer, producer and strategist who spent the past decade in greater China working at the intersection of art, media, and futurism. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, the New York Times T Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and as a contributing editor of China's leading art magazine LEAP. She's a co-founder of Paloma Powers, a consultancy developing artist-led solutions for realms beyond the art-world, and of Cultureâ„¢, the publication and conference exploring the role of brands in creative culture. Recent clients include GE, Apple, Absolut, Gucci, and Netflix (for which she produced the hit 2017 documentary series The Confession Tapes and consulted on 2018's Ugly Delicious).

Sean Donahue is principal of Research-Centered Design, a Los Angeles-based design practice that explores how design can be utilized to make significant contributions to society. MFA, Media Design, Art Center College of Design; BA, Graphic Design, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. researchcentereddesign.com

Tim Durfee's interdisciplinary architecture studio is based in Los Angeles. He has won awards for architecture, exhibitions, media design, installation, furniture, and poetry. Current projects include a large suspended artwork for the Los Angeles Police Department, the forthcoming book Made Up: Design's Fictions, and a computer game / urban simulation with Ben Hooker examining a world with drones, self-driving cars, and moving houses. MArch, Yale University; BA, Literature, History, University of Rochester. TimDurfee.com

Colleen Estrada is an interaction designer with a passion to humanize high tech. A strong leader with a unique combination of product, people, design and engineering management skills, she is adept at applying that unique combination to the design, development and timely delivery of market-defining, easy to use software products and services by high performing teams. Specialties include: Interaction Design, Visual Design, Mobile, Web, HCI, NUI, CUI, Bots, Agents, User Research, NLP, AI, Product/Service Strategy, Program and Product Management, Social Media, Community Management, Copywriting.

Jessica Frucht is the Associate Creative Lead at Riot Games in Los Angeles, CA. She received a bachelors from NC State University in Industrial Design.

Danya Glabau, PhD, is an anthropologist, science and technology studies (STS) scholar, and feminist futurist. She the Founder of Implosion Labs, an ethnography-driven research group, a Faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and Adjunct Instructor in the Technology, Culture, and Society department at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Her scholarly research and book-in-progress examines food allergy patient activism in the United States, while her consulting work focuses on advocating for human-centered innovation in emerging industries like virtual reality. A commitment to imagining and developing technologies that make life better for more people, especially women, workers, and people of color, runs through all of her work.

Lauren Halsey works in Los Angeles. Halsey received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts, in 2012, and MFA from Yale University, in 2014. She has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California (2016); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016); Recess, New York (2016); and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015). She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015), Alice Kimball English Travelling Fellowship (2013), and Beutner Family Award for Excellence in the Arts, California Institute of the Arts (2011). Halsey was an artist in residence at the Main Museum (2017), Studio Museum in Harlem (2014-15), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). She received the William H. Johnson Prize in 2017.

Nathan Hertz is a Senior Producer working for a business skills training organization, Mobus Creative Negotiating, where I interface with high-level business people and develop a broad range of creative media assets for companies such as AT&T, Borg Warner, and Zeiss, among many others. In addition to overseeing the media production team at Mobus, I also lead SAG feature film productions as a Producer, Director, and Assistant Director.

Ben Hooker is a designer and artist who works with interactive media in and about urban contexts. His projects, whether conceptual or applied, define new experiences and aesthetic situations which arise from the intermingling of the phenomenal and intangible worlds of physical materiality and electronic data. He investigates how site-specific media technologies can be employed to exploit the play between many realms to enable new kinds of technology-dependent lifestyles. He is Associate Professor and Core Faculty in the Media Design Practices graduate program at ArtCenter where he co-directs the new Post-Geographic City research group.benhooker.com/

Olalekan Jeyifous received a BArch from Cornell University and is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited at venues such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the MoMA, the Vitra Design Museum and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. He has received a number of awards and grants for his artwork such as a fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts, and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts as well as the Brooklyn Arts Council. He has completed Artist Residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Visible Futures Lab at SVA, Headlands Center for the Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Drawing Center's Open Sessions program, and he was a Wilder Green Fellow at the MacDowell Colony.

Rachel Kinnard is a costume designer | wardrobe stylist | writer living in Los Angeles, CA.

Byron Merritt is the Global Vice President of Retail Innovation at Nike, and his team focus on the future of Nike's digital and physical retail experiences. Looking across the consumer entire shopping journey, the team looks at how technology and can bring to life next generation service experience for consumers. His career has moved seamlessly across Marketing, Design and Innovation fusing diverse creative disciplines to drive new experiences. Previous roles at Nike, Byron lead design across Nike's portfolio of digital products, was the Brand Creative Lead for North America, Nike's largest geography, lead and drove the creative for the launch of the Nike+ Fuelband, created new to Nike digital/physical customization experiences as well as being the creative director of Nike's first fitness experience in collaboration with Microsoft for the Xbox platform. Prior to Nike, Byron was a Design Leader at IDEO in San Francisco and earned a Masters Degree in Architecture at SCIArc in Los Angeles.

Radha Mistry has a background in architecture, narrative environments, and strategic foresight. In the Office of the CTO (OCTO) at Autodesk, Radha explores the impact of emerging technologies and how it will change the way we design and make things in the future. Prior to Autodesk, Radha focused on the Future of Work with the Steelcase Applied Research group. Her work sought out ways organizations could drive Innovation through design. Previous to Steelcase, Radha was part of the Arup Foresight + Innovation team in London and San Francisco, crafting speculative futures for global clients; and was one of the original co-founders of GOATstudio in New Orleans. Radha has also exhibited during the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and worked on design-led community engagement initiatives in cities across Europe.

Nidhi Singh Rathore is a traveler and a designer who bridges information gaps, through digital and print media. She explores the boundaries of interdisciplinary design, and learning from others. Born and raised in Allahabad and received a bachelors degree in Graphic Design from National Institute of Design Currently, she is a Media Design Practices Masters Candidate, at ArtCenter College of Design.

Jenny Rodenhouse is a multimedia designer and artist. Working within the field of interaction design, her research examines the merging of the interface and the landscape. Her projects explore the experiences, environments, and communities that may develop from the merging of these large scale systems [virtual and physical, artificial and natural, local and global]. Appropriating the test site as a design medium, she creates sites of experimentation that act as ways to prototype alternate realities. Through her conceptual and applied design practice, she collaborates with companies, startups, computer scientists, designers, architects, and artists. Jennyrodenhouse.com

Sam Rolfes has been active across several formats and industries. Rolfes has worked on video and still-image projects for artists including Amnesia Scanner, Danny L Harle, and Caroline Polachek; fashion print and promotional design for Nicola Formichetti's Nicopanda line; a music game for Adult Swim; album art and animation for Kingdom; a distorted series of stills with Danny Brown for Complex Magazine; fashion editorials for King Kong Magazine; live visuals for Lafawndah, Squarepusher, and part of Rihanna's VMA 2016 performance; EP covers for Dawn Richard, DJ Orange Julius, and Nobel; and live 3D sculpting/visuals for Evian Christ, Mumdance, Lightning Bolt, and Teengirl Fantasy.

Richard Schulhof has served as CEO of the Los Angeles County Arboretum since 2009. He previously served as deputy director of Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum and as executive director of Descanso Gardens. With a special interest in science education, Schulhof collaborated with public schools in Boston and Los Angeles to develop teacher training programs and life science curricula. Work with the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Park Service launched programs preserving and interpreting historic landscapes and design history resources. Field research investigated the ecological impacts of invasive organisms on the forests of the Northeast and assessed associated management strategies. Schulhof holds degrees in landscape architecture from U.C. Berkeley, botanic garden administration from the University of Delaware, and in forestry from Harvard University.

Yuri Suzuki is a sound artist, designer and electronic musician who explores the realms of sound through exquisitely designed pieces. His work looks into the relationship between sound and people, and how music and sound effect their minds. His sound, art and installations have been exhibited all over the world. Suzuki was born in Tokyo in 1980. After studying Industrial Design at Nihon University, he worked for the Japanese art unit Maywa Denki (who created the Otamatone). He has been a Research Consultant for Disney, New Radiophonic Workshop and Teenage Engineering. Yuri runs Suzuki Design Studio, focusing on R&D, sound and design consultancy work, where he collaborates with many clients including Google, Moog, will.i.am, Panasonic and Disney to name a few.

Phil van Allen is an interaction designer whose work ranges from the practical to the speculative. In his research, he is exploring animistic design as a new approach for interaction in the ecosystems created by the Internet of Things. He also is the creator of NTK (netlabtoolkit.org), an open source toolkit that makes designing and building working IoT projects simpler and faster. In addition to teaching, van Allen writes about interaction design and is a consultant for industry. In the past, he's been a recording engineer, software developer, entrepreneur, and researcher. BA, Experimental Psychology/Cognitive Science, University of California, Santa Cruz, philvanallen.com

Shirley Alexandra Watts is curator of the ongoing project Natural Discourse, a series of symposia, publications and site-specific art installations that explore the connections between art, science and the humanities within the framework of botanical gardens and natural history museums. Natural Discourse began with an exhibit of site-specific installations on view at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden from July 2012 to January 2013. Shirley has organized six daylong symposia at the Berkeley Botanical Garden, the LA Arboretum, the LA Natural History Museum and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. In fall 2016 she curated the exhibit Digital Nature at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden. With support from the NEA, Digital Nature 2019 will happen at the LA Arboretum the last weekend of February 2019.

Lauren Williams is a designer, researcher, and writer who works with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways in which social and economic systems distribute and exercise power in service of a more equitable present and future. She is a graduate student in the MFA program in Media Design Practices at the ArtCenter College of Design and has worked at CFED, a national nonprofit intermediary that expands economic opportunity by helping American families build wealth and achieve financial freedom. I have a background in qualitative research and writing, nonprofit program design and management, and policy advocacy.

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator. She has written for The New York Times, Domus, Architectural Review, Architect, where she is a contributing editor, and is an opinion columnist for Dezeen. Zeiger is the 2015 recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal for excellence in writing about landscape architecture. She has curated, contributed to, and collaborated on projects that have been shown at the Art Institute Chicago, 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, the New Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, pinkcomma gallery, and the AA School. She co-curated Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City, which received the Bronze Dragon award at the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, Shenzhen. Currently, she is one of the curators of the U.S. Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.