Storytellers from the Sundance Institute New Frontier Programs present on how they are hacking dynamically-evolving communication architecture to create stories and contribute to the design of our future. Multimedia and transmedia, virtual and augmented reality, immersive and digitally connected experiences, speculative imagination and new technologies all provide unique ways of presenting narrative from diverse voices.

If you don’t know what any of this is, don’t worry: just join us! Seasoned creative technologists and artists will also certainly find inspiration.

This is a FREE event. Registration opens at 11:30 am with a complimentary brunch, before screenings of New Frontier work and artist & audience conversations. A reception will follow.

This program is presented in collaboration with Detroit Narrative Agency.
Made possible by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Conversations

Introduction and Land Acknowledgement

Maya Solis-Austin (Pascua Yaqui/Blackfeet)
Senior Manager, Native American and Indigenous Program

As senior manager for the Native American and Indigenous Program at Sundance Institute, Maya Solis-Austin identifies and supports emerging indigenous filmmakers and content creators across the U.S. and globally. Maya is also a vice-chair for Vision Maker Media, which empowers and engages native peoples to tell their stories for public television. She is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) with degrees in history, film, and moving image archive studies.

Giizhigad [ChristyB.]

Giizhigad[ChristyB.] is an Anishinaabe artist and cultural worker rooted in Southwest Detroit. Giizhigad inspires through the art of storytelling in its infinite forms. Stories hold the true essence of people and act as the woven thread interconnecting humanity. She currently builds creatively and collaboratively with The Aadizookaan [ADZKN] in the facets of music, dance, and mixed media design as a part of dynamic storytelling installations alchemizing the worlds we want to live in. These sacred stories transcend time and space by being rooted in both traditional and contemporary indigenous-based knowledge systems. Her creative practice extends to design/visual arts as well as photography and film. In addition to her creative practices, Christy is co-director with ADZKN and builds through organic collaboration, mentorship, and facilitation with their members, extending out to the greater community and all our interconnected relations.

ill Weaver

ill Weaver is a founding director of Detroit Narrative Agency. In addition to their work with DNA they are an artist and organizer who co-founded EmergenceMedia, Complex Movements, and Detroit Future Youth, in addition to organizing with Detroit Summer for over a decade. Their artistic work has been recognized by awards and fellowships including Sundance Knight Fellows (2016), United States Artists (2015), Kresge Arts in Detroit (2010), and the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for Women and Gender in the Arts and Media (2009).

The New Frontier of Storytelling: Ruthie Doyle
Manager, New Frontier Lab Program
The new frontier of storytelling is emerging all around us. For more than a decade, Sundance Institute's New Frontier program has celebrated and enabled groundbreaking artists that embrace technological and cultural shifts in their work. This conversation will take a look at the last five years of innovation, artistry, and disruption that has shaken up the old guard of entertainment, highlighting key stakeholders in the industry, and the need for diverse voices in engineering and imagining the future.

Ruthie Doyle is an artist, a filmmaker, and Sundance Institute’s New Frontier labs program manager. Past projects she's crewed and directed have appeared on numerous television and online outlets; at festivals including Sundance, Cannes, Berlin and Outfest; and in art spaces including The Museum of Modern Art, the Arnhem Fashion Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial. Ruthie studied at ITP, within NYU’s Institute of Film and Television, and holds an MFA in film/video from CalArts.

Artist Talk: Bayeté Ross Smith Q&A with Morgan Mann Willis

Bayeté Ross Smith

Bayeté Ross Smith is a photographer and multimedia artist from New York whose collaborative projects Along The Way and Question Bridge: Black Males have shown at the Sundance Film Festival and several others. Bayeté is a TED Resident and an embedded media maker with POV/Am Doc and The New York Times, and he has exhibited his work internationally. He is also a professor at NYU.

Morgan Mann Willis

Morgan Mann Willis (she/they) makes room for media-based organizing work to thrive. Currently Morgan is the associate director at Allied Media Projects, where she produced the Allied Media Conference for seven years. As an independent consultant, Morgan works with transmedia projects and community-inspired organizations to clarify their vision and make room for them to sustainably thrive. In 2016 she edited bklyn boihood's Lambda Literary Award–nominated anthology, Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity. In 2017, Morgan was the inaugural Roxane Gay fellow at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat, where she worked on her forthcoming novel, Politics From Nowhere. More often than not her heart is camping in Idlewild, Michigan and with her two nieces..

Creative Tensions
Artist Talk: Melissa Painter Q&A with Tyronne M. Clemons

Melissa Painter

Melissa Painter heads MAP Design Lab, a multimedia design studio focused on the intersections of emergent technologies and human intent, which employs design to tackle challenges of today and the future. She is an award-winning filmmaker and author and has premiered immersive content and feature films at Sundance, Future of Storytelling, SXSW, New York Film Festival, Cannes, and Telluride. A fellow of Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors Labs, she holds a BA in ancient Greek from Columbia University, where she graduated summa cum laude, and an MFA in film from NYU.

Tyronne M. Clemons

Tyrone M. Clemons is a native of the Detroit metro area who specializes in interactive design and development. An alumnus of Howard University inWashington, D.C., Tyrone leverages his expertise to assist creatives, institutions, and businesses in Detroit. Tyrone's résumé includes experienceswith a range of Detroit-based start-upswhere he honed his development skills. However, it was his freelance work for nonprofits and arts organizations like EmergenceMedia that shaped his view on the use of technology and art as a vehicle for progressively impacting his community. His vision is to amplify the voices of creatives and stories of Detroit natives through the use of extended reality (aka XR, a catch-all phrase which includes virtual, mixed, and augmented reality).

Artist Talk: Ashley Baccus-Clark

Ashley Baccus-Clark is a Brooklyn-based molecular and cellular biologist and multidisciplinary artist who uses new media and storytelling to explore themes of deep learning, cognition, memory, trauma, and systems of belief. She is the director of research at Hyphen-Labs, an international team of engineers, scientists, architects, and artists creating at the intersection of art and emerging technology.

Cézanne Charles

Cézanne Charlesis a designer, curator, and researcher working on design, technology, social justice, and public policy for future-making. Cezanne co-founded with John Marshall rootoftwo, a research and practice-driven hybrid design studio formed in 1998. rootoftwo works to create the conditions where we can perceive ourselves, the here and now, and the future differently. rootoftwomakes social objects, experiences, and works for the public realm? typically at the scale of devices, furniture, or small buildings. Their projects are designed to disrupt and reframe systems, networks, and infrastructure. Charles is also the director of creative industries for CreativeMany Michigan, leading its programs that provide the knowledge, funding, networks, and advocacy needed to empower the practices of artists, designers, designer-makers, and creative technologists within the state.

Sundance Institute Staff in Attendance

Holden Payne
Director, Technical Exhibition and Production

Holden Payne is the director of technical exhibition and production at Sundance Institute. A lover of dachshunds, eclectic rock music, and fine dining, he is ready to speak nerdy with anyone on topics ranging from theatrical lighting and sound to Sonic Youth and his extensive graphic T-shirt collection.

Jenny Stamenson
Assistant Director, Operations, Artist Programs

Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, Jenny Stamenson is the assistant director of operations for artist programs overseeing lodging, meals, and events for all Sundance Institute residency labs. A graduate of the University of San Diego, Jenny has focused her career on event planning, program development, and logistics and is incredibly thankful to now apply those skills to support artists through her work at the Institute.

Corey Buckley
Project Coordinator, Technology Services

Born in Connecticut but spending the last nine years living peripatetically and working across the country on the film festival circuit in various capacities (including as the technical manager for virtual reality at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017), Corey Buckley now calls the mountains home. He is interested in and excited for the future of VR/AR/MRas a way to create and experience other worlds. An artist himself, Corey enjoys drawing, and he also makes a mean pie crust.

Hud Oberly (Comanche, Osage, Caddo)
Coordinator, Native American and Indigenous Program

As program coordinator for the Native American and Indigenous Program at Sundance Institute, Hud Oberly oversees the program’s calendar and manages events and artists at the annual Sundance Film Festival. He recently graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with degrees in advertising and business. Prior to joining Sundance, Hud served as an intern for United National Indian Tribal Youth (UNITY) Inc. and spent time in the sports marketing industry.

Land Acknowledgements

We acknowledge and uplift the history of Detroit as Anishinaabe and other Indigenous people’s land, known as Waawiiyaatanong. [Pronunciation of waawiiyaatanong: Wah-Wee-Yah-Tuh-Nung] It is also the largest majority Black city in the nation, with a long legacy of African Diasporic global contributions, which was once the last stop on the Underground Railroad, known by its code name: Midnight. Detroit is also the U.S. city with the largest concentration of Arab Americans, a border city with historic and growing Latinx communities, and a legacy of Asian-American communities and movements. 

Parking Information

Please park in the lot behind the museum on Kirby Street. To avoid paying a parking fee, you must notify the attendant upon entering the lot that you are attending the Sundance event, and you must also sign in at the front desk.

Panelists

Ashley Baccus-Clark

Ashley Baccus-Clark is a Brooklyn-based molecular and cellular biologist and multidisciplinary artist who uses new media and storytelling to explore themes of deep learning, cognition, memory, trauma, and systems of belief. She is the director of research at Hyphen-Labs, an international team of engineers, scientists, architects, and artists creating at the intersection of art and emerging technology.

Melissa Painter

Melissa Painter heads MAP Design Lab, a multimedia design studio focused on the intersections of emergent technologies and human intent, which employs design to tackle challenges of today and the future. She is an award-winning filmmaker and author and has premiered immersive content and feature films at Sundance, Future of Storytelling, SXSW, New York Film Festival, Cannes, and Telluride. A fellow of Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors Labs, she holds a BA in ancient Greek from Columbia University, where she graduated summa cum laude, and an MFA in film from NYU.

Bayeté Ross Smith

Bayeté Ross Smith is a photographer and multimedia artist from New York whose collaborative projects Along The Way and Question Bridge: Black Males have shown at the Sundance Film Festival and several others. Bayeté is a TED Resident and an embedded media maker with POV/Am Doc and The New York Times, and he has exhibited his work internationally. He is also a professor at NYU.

Benjamin Wiessner

Benjamin Wiessner is a North Carolina–based producer named to Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Indie Film in 2012 as part of the collective ornana films. He has produced over a dozen short films in both hand-drawn animation and live action, with awards at festivals like SXSW and Sundance, and has worked on 10 features, including producing Thunder Road (2018 SXSW Grand Jury Award).

Sundance Institute Staff

Ruthie Doyle

Manager, New Frontier Lab Program
Ruthie Doyle is an artist, a filmmaker, and Sundance Institute’s New Frontier labs program manager. Past projects she's crewed and directed have appeared on numerous television and online outlets; at festivals including Sundance, Cannes, Berlin and Outfest; and in art spaces including The Museum of Modern Art, the Arnhem Fashion Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial. Ruthie studied at ITP, within NYU’s Institute of Film and Television, and holds an MFA in film/video from CalArts

 Maya Solis-Austin (Pascua Yaqui/Blackfeet)

Senior Manager, Native American and Indigenous Program
As senior manager for the Native American and Indigenous Program at Sundance Institute, Maya Solis-Austin identifies and supports emerging indigenous filmmakers and content creators across the U.S. and globally. Maya is also a vice-chair for Vision Maker Media, which empowers and engages native peoples to tell their stories for public television. She is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) with degrees in history, film, and moving image archive studies.

Hud Oberly (Comanche, Osage, Caddo)

Coordinator, Native American and Indigenous Program
As program coordinator for the Native American and Indigenous Program at Sundance Institute, Hud Oberly oversees the program’s calendar and manages events and artists at the annual Sundance Film Festival. He recently graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with degrees in advertising and business. Prior to joining Sundance, Hud served as an intern for United National Indian Tribal Youth (UNITY) Inc. and spent time in the sports marketing industry.

Jenny Stamenson

Assistant Director, Operations, Artist Programs
Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, Jenny Stamenson is the assistant director of operations for artist programs overseeing lodging, meals, and events for all Sundance Institute residency labs. A graduate of the University of San Diego, Jenny has focused her career on event planning, program development, and logistics and is incredibly thankful to now apply those skills to support artists through her work at the Institute.

Holden Payne

Director, Technical Exhibition and Production
Holden Payne is the director of technical exhibition and production at Sundance Institute. A lover of dachshunds, eclectic rock music, and fine dining, he is ready to speak nerdy with anyone on topics ranging from theatrical lighting and sound to Sonic Youth and his extensive graphic T-shirt collection.

Corey Buckley

Project Coordinator, Technology Services
Born in Connecticut but spending the last nine years living peripatetically and working across the country on the film festival circuit in various capacities (including as the technical manager for virtual reality at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017), Corey Buckley now calls the mountains home. He is interested in and excited for the future of VR/AR/MR as a way to create and experience other worlds. An artist himself, Corey enjoys drawing, and he also makes a mean pie crust.