Kent Bye

Since May 2014, Kent Bye has conducted over 1600 Voices of VR podcast interviews featuring the pioneering artists, storytellers, and technologists driving the resurgence of virtual & augmented reality. He's an oral historian, experiential journalist, & aspiring philosopher, helping to define the patterns of immersive storytelling, experiential design, ethical frameworks, & the ultimate potential of XR. You can find his podcast at voicesofvr.com and his latest thoughts on Twitter @kentbye.

Matthias Leitner

I am a digital storyteller, certified ux designer and scrum master. I develop content and impact strategies for companies, NGOs, foundations and the public sector.
For Bayerischer Rundfunk, I have been heading the storytelling lab audience:first since 2015 and in the Digital Developments & Social Media department I develop program innovations such as the messenger project #icheisner or the XR installation “Die Rettung”.
In 2017 I was appointed a fellow of the Federal Cultural and Creative Industries. I have received numerous awards for my journalistic and artistic work, most recently for #icheisner the Parliament Media Prize of the German Bundestag 2020 and for “Die Rettung” with the New Realities Award 2020.
www.matthias-leitner.de

Sara Lisa Vogl

Sara Lisa Vogl is co-founder of the organisation Women In Immersive Technologies Europe (WIIT) and member of the Global Future Council VR/AR of the World Economic Forum. As a designer with a background in Communication Arts and Interactive Media, she has dedicated herself to the research and development of new VR experiences since 2013 and investigates their impact on human perception. Sara is convinced of the potential of immersive and virtual realities, creates new interaction concepts and experiments with possibilities in UX design for VR. Sara is based in Berlin and Montreal.

Ana Brzezinska

Ana Brzezinska is an Extended Reality Producer & Curator, currently running an American-French immersive production studio Kaleidoscope. The company produces VR experiences ('Spheres', starring Jessica Chastain and Patti Smith and executive produced by Darren Aronofsky, 'Battlescar', starring Rosario Dawson), and exhibitions in the virtual gallery of the Museum of Other Realities including the biggest VR exhibition at Cannes XR/Marché du Film, a first virtual fashion show with RYOT/Verizon Media, and a first national collection of immersive art with Digital Catapult/UKRI. Ana serves as an expert to public funds (Creative Europe MEDIA), collaborates with non-governmental organizations, universities and business. Former Discovery Group Producer and Director, and Lead Multimedia Specialist at the Grand Theatre–National Opera, she has over 15 years of experience in audiovisual content creation working across television, film, digital media and theatre. She is also the author of awarded documentary and virtual reality projects.

Elisabeth Mayer

Elisabeth Mayer has been working at Centre for Virtual Reality and Visualisation (V2C) of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) since 2017. The V2C provides state-of-the-art hardware and software as well as know-how in the fields of visualisation and visualisation technologies. Elisabeth’s research fields include Virtual Reality interfaces, photorealistic rendering workflows and visualisation of big datasets. Elisabeth specializes on Game Engines and 3D and uses these tools for various projects of VR and visualization. Additionally, she lectures at the LMU Munich and her lecture topics range from Virtual Reality to the use of Game Engines in research. In the past years she has also collected experience in mixed reality exhibitions, first during university as past of the Campus Exhibition of the Ars Electronica in 2017, being a mentor in the European Creators Lab 2019 and also in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Munich.

Alex Herrmann

Alex Herrmann has worked in Film and Media for over 20 years. After studies of MultiMediaArt and International Co-Production he worked at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg for the curation of interdisciplinary development labs where he implemented Hackathons into the curriculum as early as 2013. His work as a producer and thinker brought him together with partners like RedBull, Universal London, Cern, LMU Munich, Goethe Institute and many others. 5 years ago he founded expanding focus GmbH, a XR and Games studio situated in Leipzig.

Philipp Maas

Philipp Maas is a director for Animation and XR experiences. His VR short film SONAR from 2014 was one of the first from Germany to get selected at the Sundance Film Festival and was sold around the world. In 2016 he worked as a Layout Artist on the Emmy nominated DEAR ANGELICA, by Oculus Story Studio. Currently Philipp is a Director at Fable Studio, leading the company’s creative efforts to push the boundaries of storytelling through interactive AI-driven virtual characters such as Lucy from the Emmy winning VR experience Wolves In The Walls.

Liz Rosenthal

Curator, executive producer and pioneer of immersive and interactive creative media.

Liz is Curator of Venice Biennale’s International Film Festival's Official Selection and Competition programme Venice VR, Executive Producer of immersive content accelerator programme, CreativeXR, led by Arts Council England and Digital Catapult and the CEO & Founder of trail-blazing innovation company Power to the Pixel.

Throughout her career, Liz has helped international media businesses and artists to innovate and adapt their practice to evolving platforms, tools and audiences. She has advised countless leading international festivals, media organisations and national and regional funds and led numerous incubation and funding programmes as well as curated exhibitions for interactive and immersive works.

Liz began her media career in the film business. She set up and ran the UK office for Next Wave Films a division of the Independent Film Channel in the US from 1998 to 2002. Next Wave was a pioneer in the production, finance and sales of micro-budget features by filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan.

She is invited regularly to speak at leading events and institutions around the world and is a board director of The Space commissioning fund for digital arts projects), an advisory board member of Immerse UK whose content subgroup she chairs. She is a member of BAFTA, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, The Guild of Future Architects and a fellow of the RSA.

Ricardo Laganaro

Ricardo Laganaro is an award-winning Brazilian director, partner, and Chief StoryTelling Officer at ARVORE Immersive Experiences. His most recent piece, The Line, has received several awards globally, including “Best VR Experience” at the 76th Venice Film Festival and a Primetime Emmy® Award for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Programming. Ricardo entered the immersive world in 2013, creating a full-dome experience for the Museum of Tomorrow, the biggest cultural venue built in Rio for the Olympics. He also directed 360º commercials and music videos that together have over 70 million views, and in 2016, Ricardo directed the VR doc “Step to the Line”, produced by Oculus. The short premiered at the Tribeca Festival 2017 and was selected amongst over 30 festivals globally.

Ingrid Kopp

Ingrid Kopp is a co-founder of Electric South, a non-profit initiative to develop virtual reality and other new forms of storytelling across Africa. Electric South works with interdisciplinary artists across the continent to develop, produce and distribute immersive work. In this role, she produces and facilitates an annual residential lab, and is an executive producer on award-winning VR projects, including The Other Dakar and Le Lac. Electric South projects have screened at festivals around the world including Sundance, Tribeca, and Venice.

Ingrid also co-founded Immerse, an online publication on emerging nonfiction storytelling which is produced with MIT’s Open DocLab and Dot Connector Studio. She is currently on the editorial collective for Immerse and writes a monthly newsletter on all things immersive.

Until the end of 2017, Ingrid was a senior consultant in the Interactive Department at the Tribeca Film Institute. She was director of the department from 2011 to 2015. Through the TFI New Media Fund, she supported groundbreaking projects like The Enemy and Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness. Ingrid created the Institute’s other digital and interactive programs, including the TFI Interactive conference and Tribeca Hacks, bringing storytellers, technologists, and designers together to explore new collaborations. She also created the Storyscapes section of the Tribeca Film Festival and continues to curate immersive work for the festival.

Paul Raphaël

An immersive entertainment revolutionary, Paul Raphaël combines creative and technological innovation to design ever-evolving forms of storytelling. The EMMY^® Award-winning filmmaker, visual artist, director and studio head is known for his projects’ remarkable sense of presence and ingenuity. He’s enhanced how viewers consciously and personally connect with an experience, creating incredibly life-like, emotionally authentic worlds through the technologies of VR, AR and MR. In a decade-long collaboration with his Felix & Paul Studios co-founder Félix Lajeunesse, he designed the camera technologies that brought the duo’s concepts to life. Together they created the first ever cinematic VR experience, Strangers with Patrick Watson — the project that launched Felix & Paul Studios in 2013. Since then, Paul has co-directed and overseen the creative direction of the studio’s 21 projects, including the EMMY^®Award-winning interactive feature The People’s House with former-President Barack Obama, original VR fiction-feature experience Miyubi, and documentary series Space Explorers in collaboration with NASA. He’s brought his expertise to recent co-productions Roger Ross Williams’ Oscar-winning Traveling While Black, NFB-Clyde Henry Productions’ Gymnasia, and is working with TIME on the latest filming of Space Explorers aboard the International Space Station, using Felix & Paul Studios’ specialized cameras. Spurring the evolution of storytelling as an interactive experience, Paul works closely with expanded technical teams and creative partners to lead Felix & Paul Studios into an elevated future of immersive entertainment.

Oliver Czeslik

Oliver Czeslik is an award-winning creator, writer and producer of VR Experiences, plays and films. His plays have toured internationally, including Philip Seymore Hoffman staged "khaddafi rocks" at the Public Theatre New York. His current VR installation "Mind The Brain!" will be on view at Deutsches Museum Munich in Nov. 2021. He produced theatrical and TV feature films, mostly based on his screenplays, and shown among others on Sky Movies and ZDF and cinemas. Oliver is a frequent lecturer, among others at Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin/dffb), and lead international workshops e.g. at Theatertreffen Berlin. Founder of the screen-writing department at S. Fischer publishers, Frankfurt a.M.

Together with Kathrin Brunner, Oliver Czeslik founded mYndstorm productions to bring movement to the structures – between the galloping development in the field of film, science, VR, AI and visual Art; and traditional cultural values and ideas of ‚storytelling’. mYndstorm productions works with artists, scientists and technologists to create an extension of human perceptual capabilities in VR through neurosensory body feedback and a new understanding of narration.

Kathrin Brunner

Kathrin Brunner is a passionate innovator and producer in the field of digital media, digital media distribution and content development. Curiosity is what drives her.

She has held Senior Management positions at Warner/ Bertelsmann Joint Venture in2movies, Deutsche Telekom and Discovery Communications. Her company Starberry.the media factory has consulting credentials with a wide range of companies, from ProSiebenSat1’s VoD platform maxdome to the german public broadcasters. With mYndstorm productions Berlin she is currently curating the film selection on behalf of Endava GmbH for Deutsche Bahn and their train cinema platform. With mYndstorm productions Munich, she specializes on future concepts for narration. mYndstorm produces neuroreactive Virtual Reality Experiences; among others the award winning “Mind the Brain!”, funded by fff Bayern.

Kathrin Brunner holds a doctoral degree in Strategic Management from Munich School of Management (LMU) on the topic of Organisation Theory in times of Globalization.

Max Haarich

Max Haarich (he/his) is a Munich-based artistic researcher, conceptual artist, and ethicist. He has studied communication science at RWTH Aachen and Critical Thinking at the University of the Underground in New York. After his studies he researched Artificial Intelligence at RWTH Aachen and worked as the Manager Communications for Europe’s leading startup center before he quit his job to build bridges between arts and tech. He founded the Embassy of the Republic of Užupis to artistically reflect about the impact of technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain. His embassy has exhibited at festivals like Ars Electronica and Pixelache and cooperated with partners like Harvard MetaLab and the United Nations. Max Haarich loves paradoxy, pixels and peanuts, because they all start with π.

Lena Thiele

Prof. Lena Thiele, writer and artistic director of the Berlin-based creative studio Miiqo Studios has been conceptualizing and producing award-winning digital media formats since 2003. Her focus lies on creating innovative and immersive narrative formats at the intersection of state-of-the-art technology, art, and science. Her productions received numerous awards, such as the SXSW Innovation Award for the best visual media experience, Grimme Online Award and the Prix Italia 2015. Her latest project, the VR-Experience “Myriad.Where we connect.” was in the official selection of the “Venice VR Expanded” section of the 78th Venice International Film Festival.

She additionally works as a trainer for international programs and universities and as a consultant to the international media industry. In recent years, she has served multiple times as a member of the jury for the International Digital Emmy® Award non-fiction category and was part of the jury for the Grimme Online Awards. She was appointed to serve on the Grimme Institute’s advisory committee. Since 2016 Lena Thiele is a professor for "Digital Narratives - Art&Design" at the ifs - international filmschool cologne.