These international leaders and innovators in new media will offer their advice and expertise to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s new Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts.

Ashley Baccus-Clark

Ashley Baccus-Clark

Ash Baccus-Clark is a Brooklyn-based Molecular & Cellular Biologist and multidisciplinary artist who uses new media and storytelling to explore themes of deep learning, cognition, memory, race, trauma, and systems of belief. Ash is currently represented by Mssng Peces, is an Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, and a 2019 United States Artist fellow in Media.

Full Ashley Baccus-Clark bio

Preeta Bansal

Preeta Bansal

Preeta Bansal is a senior global executive and lawyer whose career has been at the intersection of law, public policy, government, academia and global business. Bansal served as general counsel and senior policy advisor to Barack Obama in the White House (Office of Management and Budget). She is a Lecturer at the MIT Media Lab and a Senior Advisor at MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines.

Full Preeta Bansal bio

Tom Barker

Tom Barker portrait

Barker has worked as an educator, researcher, strategist, designer, and maverick in architecture, art, technology and design for 25 years. His client list includes the late Zaha Hadid, Luminato Festival, TVO Broadcasting, London Eye, IMAX, Sony Playstation, Bank of America, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, 3 Mobile, O2 Mobile, Targetti Lighting, Dyson, Sharp Solar, LendLease, Arup and Siemens.

Full Tom Barker bio

Susan Bonds

Susan Bonds portrait

Susan Bonds is a pioneer in experiential storytelling—the art of crafting immersive narratives that spill off the screen and allow the audience to participate across platforms—and the force behind 42 Entertainment’s critically acclaimed interactive experiences, including The Dark Knight, Halo and Nine Inch Nail’s Year Zero.

Full Susan Bonds bio

Tim Chang

Tim Chang portrait

Tim Chang is a Partner at Mayfield Fund, and an experienced investor and global executive. He has twice been named to the Forbes Midas list of Top Tech Investors and received the Gamification Summit award for Special Achievement.

Full Tim Chang bio

Nonny de la Peña

Portrait of Nonny de la Peña

Nonny de la Peña is CEO & Founder of award-winning innovation company Emblematic Group. Often acknowledged as “The Godmother of Virtual Reality,” she is a pioneer of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality who is widely credited with inventing the genre of immersive journalism.

Full Nonny de la Peña bio

Madeline Di Nonno

Madeline Di Nonno portrait

Madeline is the CEO of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. She also serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Television Academy Foundation; Board of Directors: Population Media Center, and Promundo U.S.; Advisory Board PBS Kid’s Ready Jet Go, GameChanger Films; YouTube Red Hyperlinked. Di Nonno served as President, Glass Lions Jury for the Cannes Lions 2016.

Full Madeline Di Nonno bio

Noah Falstein

Noah Falstein portrait

Noah Falstein, who works at the intersections of neurogaming, VR and fun, was chief game designer at Google and has experience at developers such as LucasArts, 3DO and Dreamworks Interactive. He is widely known as “The Father of Serious Games”.

Full Noah Falstein bio

Maureen Fan

Maureen Fan portrait

Maureen Fan is CEO & Co-Founder of the 6 time Emmy award winning Baobab Studios, the world's leading interactive narrative animation studio. Baobab's mission: Bring out your sense of wonder. Inspire you to dream. Make YOU matter. Baobab has won an Emmy for Best Interactive Media for every qualifying project the studio has created. Named Fast Company's 2018 Most Innovative Company, Baobab is creatively led by Eric Darnell, the writer and director of Antz and all 4 Madagascar films.

Full Maureen Fan bio

Behnaz Farahi

Behnaz Farahi portrait

Behnaz Farahi is a creative designer and technologist working at the intersection of fashion, architecture and interaction design. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Ars Electronica, Linz and Context Art Miami, and has been featured in several magazines and online websites including WIRED, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, and Frame Magazine. She has won several awards including Innovation By Design Linda Tischler Award, World Technology Award (WTN) and is the recipient of the BASA and Madworkshop Grants and the Rock Hudson Fellowship.

Full Behnaz Farahi bio

Norman Hollyn

Norman Hollyn portrait

In Tribute

Full Norman Hollyn bio

Shekhar Kapur

Shekhar Kapur portrait

Shekhar Kapur is a visionary filmmaker and storyteller who works at the intersection of art, myth and activism. Kapur is best known for directing Oscar and BAFTA award winning films Elizabeth, Golden Age, Bandit Queen and Four Feathers. In India he is best known for being a judge on the reality TV series India’s Got Talent.

Full Shekhar Kapur bio

Erica Larsen-Dockray

Erica Larsen-Dockray portrait

Erica Larsen-Dockray is an experimental artist who grew up near Scottsbluff, Nebraska. In her undergraduate studies, she majored in graphic design at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. After two years at Lincoln, she transferred to The Art Institute of Phoenix and graduated in 2003 with a B.A. in Media Arts and Animation. In 2010 she received a B.F.A. in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and in 2012 graduated with her M.F.A. in Experimental Animation and Integrated Media also from CalArts.

Full Erica Larsen-Dockray bio

Lev Manovich

Portrait of Lev Manovich

Dr. Lev Manovich is a Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and founder and Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab.

In 2013 Manovich appeared in the List of 25 People Shaping the Future of Design. In 2014 he was included in the list of 50 most interesting people building the future (The Verge).

Full Lev Manovich bio

Alex McDowell, RDI

Alex McDowell portrait

Alex McDowell is an award-winning designer and storyteller, who throughout his 30-year career of production design, has collaborated with directors including Steven Spielberg (Minority Report, The Terminal), Tim Burton (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and David Fincher (Fight Club), among many others.

McDowell works at the intersection of emergent technologies and experiential media. He is founder and creative director at Experimental.Design, where he and his team design immersive story worlds for industries and institutions.

Full Alex McDowell, RDI bio

Complex Movements

Complex Movements:  (clockwise from upper left) Invincible/Ill Weaver, Wesley Taylor, Sage Crump and L05 (Carlos Garcia).

Complex Movements is a Detroit-based artist collective supporting the transformation of communities by exploring the connections of complex science and social justice movements thorugh multimedia interactive performance work.

Full Complex Movements bio

Kyle Murphy

Kyle Murphy

Kyle Murphy is the Vice President, People & Corporate Communications at Hudl, a sports video technology company. Murphy's teams find and recruit top talent, get them trained, and give them tools and systems to work together effectively across the globe. Murphy's career at Hudl began as one of the first interns and among the first ten employees.

Full Kyle Murphy bio

Jeff Nicholas

Jeff Nicholas portrait

Jeff Nicholas is an award winning creative producer and director with a passion for creating compelling and engaging VR content. He is also well known for his music videos and collaborations with artists such as Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, Shakira, Foo Fighters, and the Beastie Boys.

Since 2014, Nicholas’s focus has been primarily on creating high-quality VR/360° experiences, pushing the boundaries of cinematic VR/360° production through original and branded content experiences.

Full Jeff Nicholas bio

Clint! Runge

Clint! Runge is Co-founder and Managing Director of Archrival, a youth culture agency that reinvents how brands win the hearts and minds of young adults. Clint! and team light the fires for clients such as Red Bull, Adidas, Hollister and Spotify by going against the grain of traditional marketing to build brand love, loyalty and sales with teens to twenty-somethings.

Full Clint! Runge bio

Ted Schilowitz

Ted Schilowitz portrait

Ted Schilowitz is the first-ever Futurist-in-Residence for Paramount Pictures. In his new role, Schilowitz, who was previously a consulting futurist at Fox, will work closely with the Paramount and Viacom technology teams to explore all forms of new and emerging technologies, with an emphasis on virtual reality and augmented reality.

At Fox, Schilowitz worked on the evolving art and science of advanced motion picture creation and devised strategies on future technology and the vision of cinema for the next generation of movie entertainment.

Full Ted Schilowitz bio

Seth Shapiro

Seth Shapiro Headshot

Two-time Emmy® Award winner Seth Shapiro is a global leader in media and technology. His clients and partners have included The Walt Disney Company, Comcast, DIRECTV, Intel, AT&T, IPG, NBC, Showtime, RTL, Telstra, Universal, Slamdance, Goldman Sachs, government bodies, and a wide range of startups. He has been an Expert Witness in matters before both the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice. His first book, “TELEVISION: Innovation, Disruption, and the World’s Most Powerful Medium,” is an Amazon bestseller—and features Mr. Carson prominently on its cover.

Full Seth Shapiro bio

Ralph Simon

Ralph Simon

Ralph Simon is acknowledged as one of the founders of the modern mobile entertainment and content industry. Over the last 18 years, he has been a prominent global mobile trailblazer and innovator, helping grow the mobile entertainment, mobile health and mobile content industry, while playing a central role in its impact and presence around the world. Today, mobile is a key platform to reach the more than 7.3 billion mobile subscribers worldwide.

Full Ralph Simon bio

Sean Stewart

Sean Stewart portrait

Emmy Award-winner and New York Times best-selling novelist Sean Stewart is one of the most influential digital storytellers in the world. He currently serves as the Creative Director / Design Director for Mixed Reality start-up Magic Leap.

He co-created the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) genre as the lead writer on projects such as The Beast for Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Halo 2’s I Love Bees and Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero, and was instrumental in exploring what “web-native” story can be.

Full Sean Stewart bio

Bernie Su

Bernie Su

Bernie Su is a three-time Primetime Emmy award-winning short form and interactive creator and showrunner.

His previous works include The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Emma Approved, both Primetime Emmy winning YouTube interactive series; Frankenstein MD, the first scripted digital series by PBS Digital Studios; Vanity, a Daytime Emmy-nominated digital series sponsored by Maybelline; and Socio, a psychological teen thriller developed by MTV.

Full Bernie Su bio

Roy Taylor

Roy Taylor portrait

Roy Taylor is Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of a new stealth start up designed to make pixels intelligent. He is also a Director for the Board of BAFTA (British Academy of Film & Television Arts) Los Angeles and Technology Advisor to three film schools.

Previously he was Corporate Vice President and Worldwide Head of AMD Studios based out of Hollywood, Los Angeles. Before that Taylor ran worldwide channel sales at Advanced Micro Devices responsible for more than $2 Billion annual revenue.

Full Roy Taylor bio

Robert Tercek

Robert Tercek portrait

Robert Tercek is one of the world’s most prolific creators of interactive content. His book, Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World, was the International Book Award Winner at the 2016 Frankfurt International Book Fair. In 2009, he was named one of the “25 Executives to Watch” by Digital Media Wire. Variety has named him one of the “Digital Dozen” most influential players in new media. The Industry Standard dubbed him a “TV Anarchist.”

Full Robert Tercek bio

Lynette Wallworth

Lynette Wallworth portrait

Lynette Wallworth is an internationally acclaimed artist and director whose immersive installations and films reflect connections between people and the natural world, as well as explore fragile human states of grace. In 2017 she won the Emmy for Outstanding New Approaches – Documentary at the 38th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards for her groundbreaking VR film Collisions.

Full Lynette Wallworth bio

Charles Wang

Charles Wang portrait

Charles Wang is the Deputy Director of the newly established Advanced Innovation Center for Future Visual Entertainment at the Beijing Film Academy (BFA), one of the world’s leading film schools, where he also serves as the Deputy Director of Research and Information Management, as well as Associate Professor of Film and TV Technology.

Full Charles Wang bio

Martyn Ware

Martyn Ware portrait

Martyn Ware has written, performed and produced two Human League, two British Electric Foundation, and nine Heaven 17 albums. As a record producer and artist, he has featured on recordings totaling over 50 million sales worldwide, producing amongst others Tina Turner, Terence Trent D'Arby, Chaka Khan, Erasure, Marc Almond and Mavis Staples.

Ware is a musician, composer, producer, DJ, soundscapist and music technologist. In 1978 he formed The Human League, and in 1980 he formed the production company/label British Electric Foundation, and Heaven 17.

Full Martyn Ware bio

Ross Warren

Ross Warren

Ross Warren is a Founder in Residence at Google’s experimental Area 120. He also serves as tech advisor for HRH Princess Eugenie of York’s The Anti-Slavery Collective. Australian-born, Warren has traveled extensively and brings a global perspective to his work along with a passion for creativity and innovation.

Full Ross Warren bio

James Waugh

James Waugh portrait

James Waugh has worked on some of the biggest games of all times: World of Warcraft, Diablo and now Star Wars. He currently serves as the Vice President, Development of the Lucasfilm Story Group working on the Star Wars franchise. His professional passions lie in franchise building through the tapestry of compelling and interlocking narrative content.

Full James Waugh bio

Robert Wilhelm

Robert Wilhelm

Robert G. Wilhelm, Ph.D., is Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development and Kate Foster Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. An expert in precision engineering and advanced manufacturing, his career began at Cincinnati Milacron, the Rockwell Science Center and his own advanced manufacturing company. Since then, Wilhelm has held faculty positions focused on creating Ph.D. programs in areas like information technology and physical and optical science and academic leadership roles dedicated to nurturing and growing innovation.

Full Robert Wilhelm bio