Carole Kim is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on video projection for multi-media installation, video projection, live and telematic performance and digital prints. She has presented her work in diverse contexts including experimental art, music, dance, theater and site-specific installation. As someone who works extensively with technology, it is where technology meets up with the human, physical, tangible world that interests her most. Kim has a love for creating contexts that invite synergistic collaboration and co-creation. Her work has been supported by Thoughtworks Arts, Irvine Foundation, NEA, Center for Cultural Innovation, MAP fund, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, City of LA (COLA), Pasadena Arts Council, NowArt-LA, The Music Center, Durfee Foundation, REDCAT, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, The Getty Center, SASSAS, Dublab, Newtown, Turbulence.org, CalArts and Descanso Gardens. www.carole.kim | @shinealighton

Akiko Yamashita is a Los Angeles-based, Japanese artist. Yamashita is known for immersive installations using light, projection mapping, and real-time 3D animation to transform our perception with her prism-inspired full spectrum of colors. As an artist, she visualizes “invisible existences” in nature. Her work references and is drawn from Japanese animism, where every existence has a spirit or a soul. As a former dancer who became an animator, she welcomes viewers to fully immerse themselves interacting with the artworks to feel like the subject matter.  Her work Hana Fubuki (2019), exhibited at Artechouse, is one example as it turned viewers’ hand movement to wind which spread and manipulated the cherry blossom blizzards. Yamashita also creates architectural public art light installations such as her interactive hallway Portal (2015) in Downtown Los Angeles in the Little Tokyo neighborhood. Yamashita’s awards and recognition include the A’Design Silver Awards, featured in Apple keynote’s films as one of the best new generation creators and more.

JOJO ABOT is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and healer who explores the abilities of new and ancient technologies for universal healing. In her artmaking and ritual, the artist draws from her heritage as an Ewe woman from West Africa and her nomadic lived experiences across Ghana, Copenhagen, the United States, South Africa, Kenya, and elsewhere around the world.

Alice Bucknell is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their recent work has focused on creating cinematic universes within game worlds, exploring the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge. Their work has appeared internationally at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade Seoul, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Gray Area in San Francisco, Singapore Art Museum, and Serpentine in London, among others. Their writing appears in publications including ArtReview, e-flux architecture, frieze, the Harvard Design Magazine.

In 2024, they are a grantee of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, recipient of the Collide Residency at CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary, and artist-in-residence at EPFL’s Enter the Hyper-Scientific research residency program in Lausanne. Bucknell received a MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.

Marc Horowitz is a Los Angeles-based artist. Horowitz performed an innovative social practice informed by his background in entertainment and advertising. His multifaceted practice now encompasses painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Equal parts postmodern and post-internet, Horowitz’s work flattens the hierarchies of culture, politics, relationally, and history creating a diverse but singular visual universe.

David Van Eyssen grew up between London and New York City. His first exhibition was held at Goldsmiths, University of London, when he was 14. Two years earlier, David had built his first home computer with his stepfather, a systems engineer, and developed a profound interest in technology. Exhibiting as a painter and installation artist in London in the 1990s, David became interested in interactive storytelling, and started a digital media company. Moving to Los Angeles in 1996, David wrote and directed an interactive short film that opened doors to the commercial, music video, and nascent streaming video worlds. Over the next fifteen years, David pioneered online filmmaking, working as an award-winning writer-director with advertising agencies, TV networks, and film studios. In 2018, he began to make his first sound and motion works.

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is the Director of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles and Lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. Anadol’s work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Taking the data that surrounds us as primary material, and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol offers us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expands the possibilities of interdisciplinary arts. Anadol’s site-specific data paintings and sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, collective experiences, public art, decentralized networks, and the creative potential of AI. Anadol’s work has been exhibited at venues including MoMA, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Art Basel, National Gallery of Victoria, Venice Architecture Biennale, Hammer Museum, Arken Museum, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Ars Electronica, Istanbul Modern, and ZKM | Center for Art and New Media. Anadol has received a number of awards and prizes including the Lorenzo il Magnifico Lifetime Achievement Award for New Media Art, Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, Columbia University’s Breakthrough in Storytelling Award, and Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award.

Sarah Rara’s multi-disciplinary practice— including video, sound, performance, and writing— explores the position of witness within fragile systems, and the socio-political and personal dimensions of sensing technologies. They are a primary organizer of the ongoing project lucky dragons (2005-present). Their work, solo and in collaboration, has been presented at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1 in New York, REDCAT and Human Resources in Los Angeles, MOCA Los Angeles, the 54th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14 in Athens, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. Rara is Assistant Professor of Moving Image at Williams College.

Petra Cortright is an interdisciplinary artist known both for her role in the “Net-Art” movement – a movement that uses the Internet as its primary source – and as a “post-Internet artist” which is to say of the generation after the progenitors of Net-Art. She creates each unique piece by harvesting images from the internet, loading them into Photoshop, and then manipulating, stretching, and carving them up. She invents her own icons and marks using digital paintbrushes to make her brushstrokes, combining these with the manipulated and appropriated images.

Elizabeth Leister engages a practice that includes video, performance, drawing and XR production.  Her projects act as meditations on the unreliability of memory and the passing of time conceptualized through a feminist perspective on the female body, language and landscape.

Her work has been presented at the Torrance Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Morris Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, and the Delaware Museum of Art; The Drawing Center, Art in General, Apex Art and P.S. 122 in New York, Counterpath in Denver and Highways Performance Space and Gallery in Santa Monica in addition to various artist run spaces.

Leister has performed at homeLA, LACE, and Highways Performance Space, Perform Chinatown, Beyond Baroque and Electric Lodge in Los Angeles. Her networked performances have been presented at the Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries in Wales, the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at University of Reno, Outpost Artists Resources in New York and in Low Lives, among other venues.  Her VR work has been exhibited at XR for Change, Currents New Media Festival, FIVARS, REFEST by Culturehub, FEMMEBIT and Mana Body + Camera Festival and other festivals. 

She received an ARC grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation in Los Angeles, and additional grants through The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and The Leeway Foundation of Philadelphia.  Leister was awarded a 2015 COLA Fellowship from the Department of Cultural Affairs in Los Angeles.

She earned an MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Fine Arts at Bard College and a BFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University.  Leister is Assistant Professor in Emerging Media Production in the Cinema and Television Arts Department at CSUN.

Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories. He has created a series of Invisible Architecture experiences that are mash ups of the recorded acoustics of historical sites, giving new context to historic places through a contemporary lens of sound.

Nakagawa is currently one of the commissioned artists for the 2026 Counterpublic in St. Louis MO. He will be focusing on creating a database about the underground dance bar UPSTAIRS LOUNGE (1994 to 2018) with the help of the Upstairs DJ, Tran Family, staff and supporters. Working with the STL County Library, WashU Library and STL Central Library, his interdisciplinary menu will include building a database of oral histories, photos and videos. A pop up oral history station including a dance music sound element and a vinyl mural will be installed at the STL International Institute and travel to several cultural events during Counterpublic. Lastly, Nakagawa will release a dance music LP inspired by the many interviews he’s conducted, Soundbytes from these interviews will also be included on the LP.

I would like to believe that we are not alone. That there is a world that lies between the walls of this dimension and the next. Where one supposes our ancestors float, watching, sending us clues, telling us things we can’t quite comprehend through patterns and symbols. I feel that place in my music. It’s soul matter you cannot touch, that which comes out of me in song, that which tells a story of something more.

Nao Bustamante is a legendary artist, residing in Los Angeles, California. Bustamante’s precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, filmmaking, sculpture and writing. The New York Times says, “She has a knack for using her body.

Mark Hashimoto is a creative technologist, experiential designer, and digital artist who resides and operates in Los Angeles, California. Combining his formal background as a data scientist with his current work in experiential design, he strives to instill engaging personalities into our ever-growing digital environment,and stresses the need for modern technology tools to inform and inspire. He enjoys experimenting with a variety of visual mediums including projection, lighting, animation, and augmented reality. He has contributed to a number of live performances, film productions, and interactive installations throughout the country.    

Mike Sonksen aka Mike the PoeT is a 3rd-generation Southern Californian. Poet, professor, journalist, historian & tour-guide, his latest book Letters to My City was published by Writ Large Press. He’s written for Poets & Writers, KCET, Alta, Wax Poetics, PBS, LA Taco,  LA Review of Books, LAist, Boom and the Academy of American Poets. His poetry’s been featured on Public Radio Stations KCRW, KPCC & KPFK & Spectrum News. Sonksen is the Coordinator of the First Year Experience Program at Woodbury University & has been awarded by the Los Angeles Press Club.

Founded in 2003, LAVA (Los Angeles Video Artists) is a community of video artists and creative technologists working primarily in the field of immersive experiential digital art.

The goal of the LAVA community is to promote and nurture the evolution of video art with the latest technological magic in the greater Los Angeles area.

LAVA members are constantly contributing to the current discourse around live mult-media performances/ activations/ installations/ LED pixel mapping, 360 dome visuals, 3D and 4D projection mapping, interactive and immersive experiences, AudioVisual software and hardware customization, content consciousness, ethics, and best practices. LAVAmakes.art | @LAVAsees

Nancy Baker Cahill is a new media artist who examines systemic power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. 

Her geolocated AR installations have been exhibited globally and have earned her profiles in the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications, and she was included in ARTnews’ list of 2021 ‘Deciders’. Her work was featured in the Immersive Main Competition at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and was exhibited on 90 screens in Times Square for the entire month of July as part of the Midnight Moments program.

Baker Cahill was an artist scholar in the Berggruen Institute’s inaugural Transformations of the Human Fellowship, and a 2021 resident at Oxy Arts’ ‘Encoding Futures,’  focused on AR monuments. She is a TEDx speaker and a member of the Guild of Future Architects. In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and received the C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship. She is a 2022 LACMA Art and Tech Grant recipient.

Ryan Patrick Griffin is a visual artist based out of Los Angeles, CA.  Griffin uses projected light as a vehicle to activate the environment in a poetic, performative and public way.  The artist’s practice incorporates drawing, painting, photography, animation and video, while extending these traditions through contemporary digital media tools to share unique experiences and stories. Griffin graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His works have been performed and exhibited across the nation as well as internationally. The artist organizes frequent happenings, Projected Visions, using projected light to radically repurpose the place.

Luciana Abait was born in Argentina and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Her multimedia works deal with climate change, environmental awareness, immigration, displacement, assimilation and adaptation. Abait’s artworks have been shown widely in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia in solo shows in galleries, museums and international art fairs. Recent projects have been shown at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and the Palm Springs Museum of Art. She has completed numerous public art commissions and installations. Abait is the recipient of the 2016 Santa Monica Individual Artist Fellowship Award and the “Art Lives Here” Award by The Geffen Playhouse in 2022.

Nate Mohler (b. 1997, Los Angeles, CA) is an emerging media artist, who works with digital technology as a paint brush to build avant-garde experiences. A 2019 UCLA graduate with a B.A. in Design | Media Arts, Mohler is intrigued with the fusion of conceptual art and technology to support social activism with unconventional space and sound. His work raises questions about art + technology through digital mediums such as projection mapping, immersive installations, sculpture and video art.

Over the past couple years Mohler has worked under the mentorship of artists such as Casey Reas, Jennifer Steinkamp, Rebecca Mendez, and Refik Anadol. In 2019, Mohler completed his largest public art installation; Culver Current, which illuminates the courtyard of City Hall in Culver City with video art reflective of Culver City’s neighborhood. In 2021, Mohler produced multiple large scale gallery installations, “Be(coming) to Terms”, “Rise and Fall” and “The Eventual Unraveling of Everything“ which explored our relationship to nature and to each other.

Working to challenge the culture and definition of fine art, Mohler aims to further the digital art movement and help open the eyes of traditional collectors to digital mediums that are conceptual, engaging, and thought provoking. Nate is a sculptor, programmer, developer, artist, director, producer and curator, and his work bridges information technology with the fine art/media art community.

Leah Smithson is a Los Angeles based artist with a surrealistic nature to her work, using both traditional and new media (i.e. virtual and augmented reality) to create immersive art experiences. Having moved around as a kid, her style comes from a patchwork of influences from classical painting to cyberpunk. She uses nature & portraiture to express the complexities of being human. In her public art installations, her goal is to create little rabbit holes of experiences in the cityscape, providing moments of inspiration to remind us that our lives are about more than just surviving.

She’s collaborated with major brands, such as Apple, in public art projects. She’s worked and exhibited throughout the US and abroad, including Scope Miami during Art Basel week. She’s also been interviewed and has had her art featured in a variety of TV, print and digital magazines such as ABC7, Voyage LA, Atlanta Magazine, CBS’s Good Day Sacramento, and The Hedonist Magazine. She’s also been invited to co-host a podcast with a highly esteemed medical professional about art and your brain called Vessel: Art as a Doorway, where they discuss the tangible benefits of living with art individually & in communities. She continues using her mixed media and new media work to create immersive art experiences at CLSS studio in the Arts District.