Katerina Cizek is the artistic director, executive producer, co-founder of and research scientist at the Co-Creation Studio at MIT ODL. She is a Peabody and two-time Emmy-winning documentarian working across emergent trchnologies. With Uricchio et al., she wrote Collective Wisdom (forthcoming with MIT Press 2022). At the studio, she facilitates co-creation workshops, delegations, research and fellowships fusing art, documentary and journalism together with emergent tech and science through the lens of collective creation.

For over a decade, Cizek worked as a documentary director at the National Film Board of Canada, transforming the organization into a world-leading digital hub, with the projects HIGHRISE and Filmmaker-in-Residence. Both community-based and globally recognized, these two ground-breaking long-form digital projects garnered international awards and critical acclaim. With NFB Senior Producer Gerry Flahive, Cizek forged unconventional, co-creative partnerships with diverse organizations ranging from an inner-city teaching hospital to Mozilla Foundation, to The New York Times. The projects contributed to conversations about health-care policy, urban planning as well as the health outcomes and living conditions of the participants.

Cizek’s earlier human rights documentary film and journalistic projects instigated criminal investigations, changed UN policies, and screened as evidence at an International Criminal Tribunal. These films include the Hampton-Prize winner Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News (2002, co-directed with Peter Wintonick), In Search of the African Queen: A People Smuggling Operation (1999, co-director), and The Dead are Alive: Eyewitness in Rwanda (1995 editor, co-writer, narrator).

Cizek is a member of the Directors’ Guild of Canada, and currently serves as an advisor at the Sundance Institutes’ Interdisciplinary Lab and CPH:LAB, in Copenhagen. She is a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects, a member of the editorial collective at IMMERSE, as well as a member of the inaugural Interactive Board of jurors for the Peabody Awards.

Assia Boundaoui is the 2020-202 Co-Creation Journalism Fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab, generously sponsored by JustFilms at Ford Foundation. She is an Algerian-American filmmaker and investigative journalist who has reported internationally for NPR, BBC, AlJazeera, VICE and CNN among others. Her debut short film about hijabi hair salons for HBO Documentary Films premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Her award-winning feature-length directorial debut, THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Assia’s Muslim-American community, had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and national broadcast on PBS “POV”. Assia was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 2018 “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” was a 2019 New America National Fellow and in 2020 was honored to win the Livingston Award for national reporting. She has an M.A. in journalism from New York University and is an Algiers born, Arabic speaking, Chicago-native, currently based in southern California. While at the Co-Creation Studio, Assia is iterating her most recent hybrid work, a community co-created, AI-fueled sequel to her film: the Inverse Surveillance Project.

Srushti Kamat (ODL/Co-Creation Studio Research Assistant 2020-2022) is a writer/producer examining the intersection of filmmaking, emerging technology and civic participation. Born in Mumbai, India, she was raised in Singapore and earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree (Hon.) in History and Journalism from the University of Oregon. During her undergraduate years, she co-founded and co-directed Majesty Digital, an initiative to bring women of color both behind and in front of the camera. Her thesis examined the role of Instagram’s features in crafting space for South Asian micro-influencers of the diaspora utilizing the hashtag #unfairandlovely to create and challenge their own hyphenated identities. She realizes that was a long sentence and thanks you for sticking around. At MIT, she is keen to expand upon virtual space-creation and the tools it can provide for impending and ongoing global issues within health, education and activism. While she has produced films internationally, from Sri Lanka and Vietnam to Washington state and England, the guiding inquiry at the center of this work has remained focused on counter-perceptions of place, identity and home. She joins class of ’22 after working as a producer at Blue Chalk Media in Portland, Oregon, Telescope Studios, Singapore and on projects for Oregon Public Broadcasting.

William Uricchio is the PI and Co-Founder of the Co-Creation Studio, PI and founder of MIT Open Documentary Lab. He is Professor of Comparative Media Studies, and the faculty director of the MISTI-Netherlands Program. He revisits the histories of old media when they were new; explores interactive and participatory documentary; writes about the past and future of television; thinks a lot about algorithms and archives; and researches cultural identities and the question of “Americanization” in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is also Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has held visiting professorships at the Freie Universität Berlin, Stockholm University, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Lichtenberg-Kolleg), China University of Science and Technology, and in Denmark where he was DREAM professor. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships and the Berlin Prize; and was Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

As director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Sarah Wolozin develops and oversees lab projects, operations, and collaborations. She is the founder and editorial director of Docubase, co-founder and a member of the editorial collective of Immerse, and co-founder of the Co-Creation Studio. Wolozin has long had an interest in exploring new platforms for storytelling and social change. Before arriving at MIT, she produced award-winning documentaries and educational media for a wide variety of media outlets including PBS, WGBH, NPR, websites and museums. She started experimenting with the web back in its early stages of its public use. She has sat on numerous committees and juries including Sundance New Frontier Story Lab, Tribeca New Media Fund, the IFP Media Center, Puma Impact Award, Tribeca Storyscapes and World Press Photo. She has presented at Sundance, MOMA, SXSW, International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), Storycode, MIT, DocMontevideo and many other venues. She has a BA from Barnard College of Columbia University and speaks fluent Italian.

Vivek Bald is on the leadership team of MIT Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio. He is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His films include "Taxi-vala/Auto-biography," (1994) which explored the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and "Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music" (2003) a hybrid music documentary/social documentary about South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. Bald is currently working on a transmedia project aimed at recovering the histories of peddlers and steamship workers from British colonial India who came to the United States under the shadows of anti-Asian immigration laws and settled within U.S. communities of color in the early 20th century. The project consists of the Bengali Harlem book as well as a documentary film, “In Search of Bengali Harlem,” (currently in production), and a digital oral history website in development at bengaliharlem.com.

Claudia Romano is the producer at MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) and Co-Creation Studio, where she produces lab events and communications and supports various Lab initiatives, including Docubase, the ODL Fellows Program and ODL’s semesterly lecture series. Prior to joining ODL, she produced communications and events at Say Yes to Education. She created social media and web content for FWD.us’s “I Am An Immigrant” Campaign for Immigrant Heritage Month, and she produced short documentary videos for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage about the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Her documentary work has been featured in festivals including the Tri-Co Film Festival, Rough Cut Film Festival, and Philadelphia Latino Film Festival, and she was previously a Fellow with UPenn’s CAMRA, an interdisciplinary collective of researchers and educators committed to participatory, experimental media-making. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology & Anthropology with a minor in Spanish from Swarthmore College.

Mrinalini Singha is the research assistant at Co-Creation Studio.

Rashin Fahandej (ODL Fellow 2016-2021) is a transdisciplinary artist and filmmaker using co-creative methods. Her projects engage a variety of social, political and cultural issues through conceptual, psychological as well as aesthetic explorations. She works in a diversity of media, including but not limited to feature film documentary, video and sound installations, performance, relational art, photography and painting. Her work, solo and collaborative, has been exhibited internationally at numerous venues including The Western Front, Vancouver; Organhaus Gallery, Chongqing/China; Normale Supérieure, Paris; UCLA’s Wight Gallery, LA; Southern Exposure, Intersections for the Arts, San Francisco; Big Screen Plaza, Alwan for the Arts, NYC. Her experimental short film Sahyeh Sorkh was an official selection at Boston International Film Festival. Rashin was born and raised in Iran and currently lives in Boston, MA. She received her BFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design; and her MFA in Film studies from San Francisco Art Institute. Rashin is currently a Boston Artist-in-Residence with the Mayor’s Office of Art and Culture and a research fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Joanna Wright (ODL Fellow 2020-2021) is a multidisciplinary artist who works with documentary film, photography, sound and archive collections using co-creative methods. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Institute for Contemporary Art London, The British Film Institute, British Council, Channel 4 UK, BBC, IDFA, True/ False, the United Nations and projected onto the walls of a medieval town as part of Europe’s largest digital arts festival. Joanna was the recipient of a major Arts Council Wales award to work with The UK’s Centre for Alternative Technology, as long term artist in residence with the Zero Carbon Britain Research project. She has worked as a visiting teacher at the European Film College, and Alfred University, New York, where she was awarded the Randall Chair in Art and Design. She is currently a senior lecturer at Bangor University, Wales.

Anita Rao, M.D. (ODL Fellow 2020 – 2021) is a resident physician in psychiatry at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL. She is an award-winning media figure, academic, educator, researcher, public and private sector innovator who has established herself as a cross-sector pioneer in audiovisual mental health. Dr. Rao is the first mental health correspondent and contributor for VICE Media. She also is a national contributor for the National Alliance of Mental Illness, the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization, and infuses audiovisual mental health literacy into their outreach efforts. As an academic, Dr. Rao has received numerous accolades including the prestigious Lancet Psychiatry Poster Prize through Oxford University. As a medical student, she received Department of Psychiatry’s Chairman Award and as a resident physician in psychiatry, she received the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine Educator Award in 2018. She remains committed to exploring novel documentary and other forms of media across sectors to the end of understanding the internal life and experience of individuals by externalizing those experiences through audiovisual mediums. While at OpenDocLab, Dr. Rao is working on a white paper titled “Mindscapes: An Exploration of Audiovisual Mental Health Literacy.”

David Tamés (ODL Fellow 2021) is a documentary media maker working in both traditional and immersive media forms who recently completed Farm and Red Moon, a feature-length documentary investigating humane animal slaughter. He’s a co-creator of Bird Box, a multi-participant AR/VR experience that won Best in Art, Media & Entertainment at the 2019 Reality Virtually Hackathon. David was co-founder of MIT TechTV, a video sharing site and the early days of web video was on the team that produced The East Village, a groundbreaking entertainment web site and winner of New Media Magazine’s InVision Gold Award. He currently serves on the board of Filmmakers Collaborative.

Gabriel Vieira-Posada (ODL Fellow 2020-2021) is interested in participatory and co-creative documentary processes with and for children and youth based on immersive approaches. His current research focuses on the representation of “places of exclusion” about racism. He holds a master’s degree in cinema (University of Paris-Sorbonne) and a doctorate in audiovisual narratives (University of Antioquia/University of Montreal), and he first obtained his bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering. A filmmaker, screenwriter and photographer, he is also a professor at the University of Antioquia in Colombia, where he co-founded the Master in Audiovisual Studies and Creation, the TVLab for Research on Edutainment issues, and CreaLab, a workshop for interdisciplinary experimentation with the arts. His interests as a researcher are related to cross-cultural creation and his artistic representations through participatory processes. His publications explore innovative narrative treatments in different media, and he has developed public policies with the Board of the National Television Authority in Colombia to strengthen the creative and cultural industries.

shirin anlen (ODL Fellow 2021) is an artist and creative technologist based in New York. Her artistic practice involves creative coding, interaction design, drawings, and data research that form the basis for real-life storytelling in emerging technologies. Shirin’s work has been featured internationally including at the Queens Museum, SIGGRAPH, House of Electronic (HEK), Cannes Film Festival and Google Web Experiments. Shirin was an artist in residence at the National Film Board of Canada and a member at the NEW INC incubator together with Raycaster, an experience design studio she co-founded. She received the Best Digital Story Award from the Biennial of Medial Arts of Chile, a research grant from the Knight Foundation, and an art commission from IDFA DocLab. She co-founded the first VR festival and lab in Israel, Steamer Salon, and is a member of Women+ Art AI collective.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin was the 2019-2020 Mozilla Fellow hosted at the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and she is a co-author of Collective Wisdom. She is an artist who innovates with artificial intelligence in ways that make a positive impact on our community and the environment. She is currently a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is the inventor of Honor Native Sky, a project for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture: Honor Native Land Initiative. She founded Wampum.Codes which is both an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation. Wampum.codes was featured at the 2021 imagineNative festival. She continued her research in 2021 at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF) .

In 2019 she was a delegate at the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion for His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama, at his World Headquarters in Dharmsala India. In 2018 she was awarded a MacArthur/Sundance Institute fellowship for her 360 video immersive installation in collaboration with the artist Wendy Red Star (supported by the Google JUMP Creator program). The non-profit she founded IDEA New Rochelle, in partnership with the New Rochelle Mayor’s Office, won the 2018 $1 Million Dollar Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge for their VR/AR Citizen toolkit to help the community co-design their city. In 2018 she was awarded the 100k Alternative Realities Prize for her Virtual Reality Project from Engadget and Verizon Media. Amelia is the founder of the stupidhackathon.com.

Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.

Andrea Shinyoung Kim (ODL/CoCr Research Assistant 2019-2021) is an interdisciplinary scholar-artist experimenting with XR and co-creative storytelling practices. She is currently a Fulbright-SeoulArts Research Fellow exploring how storytelling models from Korean mask dance and shamanic performances can inform the design of culturally-informed virtual worlds. research looks at how identity is constructed and enacted in social VR, taking VRChat as an ethnographic case study. She proposes a framework for crafting virtual avatars as a practice that revives cultural heritage and feminist relations to space. Andrea is also the creative director of The (In)visible Organ, a digital media initiative inspired by a new medical technology that visualizes the cervix. This project brings together artists, engineers, and the global health community to produce new perceptions of the inner reproductive anatomy through education, art, technology, and storytelling. She is directing/producing a documentary film of the same title.

Sam Mendez (ODL/CoCr Research Assistant 2018-2020) is a researcher and animated filmmaker. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Public Health at Harvard. His films focus on cities and experimental documentary techniques; his research focuses on health equity. Sam wants to use collaborative methods and documentary techniques to improve research partnerships. How do we align people in partnership between universities and community groups? How do we center underserved communities in this work? Sam aims to find answers by working with MIT’s Open Doc Lab and public health researchers. Sam did his undergrad at Harvard, where his thesis was an animated documentary about a bodega. His inspiration came from community-based participatory research at Harvard's Viswanath Lab. In his time there, Sam worked on public health communication research. After graduation, he focused on video projects. This included a wheelchair travel series he directed in Ho Chi Minh City. More recently, he worked on public health research at Northwestern's Simon Lab. There, he focused on community engagement for a collaborative U54 grant. He also led the user-centered design process for a web resource about clinical trials. In his free time, Sam likes to learn more about web accessibility and performance art.

Josefina (ODL/CoCr Research Assistant 2018-2020) is a researcher working with media to explore the cross between technology, society, and environment. Her background in sociology and filmmaking informs her collaborative practice-based research. Recent projects include the study of predictive policing and atmospheric mediations, from the analysis of satellite geospatial imaging, drones, and the examination of computer vision databases. She conpleted her master’s in Comparative Media Studies at MIT in 2020. She is part of the Chilean film collective MAFI – Filmic Map of a Country.

Sara Rafsky (ODL/CoCr Research Assistant 2016-2018 and co-author of Collective Wisdom) is a writer and researcher who works at the intersection of journalism, press freedom, human rights and documentary film in the US and Latin America. At Doc Society, she led Safe + Secure, an initiative on mitigating risks faced by documentary filmmakers. She was previously a Google News Lab Fellow at Witness. Prior to that she was the Researcher on Central America at Amnesty International in Mexico City and the Americas Research Associate for the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York. Rafsky has written about culture and politics as a freelance journalist in New York, South America and Southeast Asia. In 2008, she received a Fulbright Grant to research photojournalism and the Colombian armed conflict. She has a BA from Georgetown University and an MS in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where she wrote her thesis "The Print that Binds: Local journalism, Civic life and the Public Sphere."

Carla LynDale Bishop (MIT & Black Public Media Fellow 2020-2021) is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor in Digital Storytelling at The University of Oklahoma. She is the inaugural recipient of the MIT & Black Public Media Fellowship, hosted by MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) and sponsored by MIT Center for Art, Science, & Technology (CAST). She received her BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Chicago and her MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University in Philadelphia. In 2013, she founded, Focused.Arts.Media.Education., an organization that trains youth how to make media that matters in their communities through in-school residencies, summer workshops and community-wide documentary projects. Her most recent projects, Freedman Town 2.0 and Voices of the Hill, center around documenting historically black communities using co-creation and new media technologies. She uses documentary production and training as a way to preserve, celebrate, honor and document the histories and stories in these communities. Her work has been featured in film festivals, conferences, and community events across the country. While at ODL, she is producing an immersive geo-locative media project titled, “Mapping Blackness”. This digital mapping platform chronicles historically black communities that are often left off of maps utilizing geotagging, Augmented Reality, 360 video, data visualization and traditional documentary storytelling. “Mapping Blackness” is a continuation of previous projects and aims to put more black communities on the map using ArcGIS technologies and co-creation methodologies between community members, technologists, students, and filmmakers.