We are proud to work with a large diverse community at UC Santa Cruz.  People on and off campus have contributed to OpenLab projects, exhibitions, and workshops since 2010. We welcome and enjoy participation from all disciplines and are pleased to serve and contribute to programs across the arts and sciences with the general public. Join us in developing new opportunities for collaborative research aimed at growing the expanded fields of creative research that engage with critical issues around the world.

Parker is an art professor and founding director of the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center and a faculty member in the UCSC Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program.

As a media artist, Parker is recognized for her innovative work investigating issues of biology and technology, combining art, ecology, and design. Through multi-sensory and transdisciplinary collaborations, she engages scientific and creative practices to explore the sensorial worlds around us.

As an educator, Parker creates spaces where disciplines intertwine, boundaries blur, and collective curiosity blossoms into a shared place for making. She shapes these transdisciplinary landscapes to inspire learning, connection, and the growth of practice. Through lab and studio wanderings, quiet dives into texts, and dialogues that thread through diverse voices, she weaves a tapestry of inquiry that awakens a deep, heuristic pursuit—one that blooms into creative research, fueling exhibitions and unfolding across pages of publications.

Art Department | Faculty Page

Professor Ramirez-Ruiz is eager to understand our origins and disruptive events in the night sky. He works with computer models to understand the cataclysmic death of stars and recently led efforts to uncover the origin of the heaviest elements in the universe.  Ramirez-Ruiz tests out his theories with complex computer simulations that defy the boundaries of human experience and the assumptions we make about the universe. Ramirez-Ruiz was born in Mexico, studied physics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and pursued his PhD at Cambridge  University. He was the John Bahcall Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton before joining the faculty at UCSC, where he is a professor of astrophysics and astronomy and holds the Vera Rubin Presidential Chair.

https://www.astro.ucsc.edu/faculty/index.php?uid=raruiz

More: Fog Blog

Hannah is a documentary filmmaker, organizer, and educator. Her work centers process-driven and formally expansive nonfiction as ethical and political practices. Through this lens, she circles around questions of landscape, listening, memory, time, and interdependence. Her work as an educator is focused on mentorship and low-cost media training through nonfiction art spaces and community centers. Her organizing work includes co-creating spaces that model mutual-aid practices while creating surprising futures

More information about Hannah can be found HERE

Gonzalo is an Argentine-American artist and filmmaker currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Film and Digital Media at the UCSC. His work and research explore contemporary artistic practices responsive to the current climatic conditions and propose a poetics of attention situated in place. He experiments with artistic methods from experimental film and music to create works and situations that engage the elements and the environment and in which the ecological becomes embodied in relation, re-imagining modes of being with more-than-human subjects. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, as a Fellow of the Climate Action Lab he is researching how the expanding field of environmental artistic practices engages with more-than-human and elemental discourses and how contemporary artistic practices can ask ethical and political questions in response to the changing climate from a situated perspective and in relation to land.

More information about Gonzalo can be found HERE

An artist, educator, and curator with a hybrid practice that floats between installation, performance, and unconventional art facilitation. Anja grew up in Berkeley, CA, and earned her BFA from California College of the Arts in 2001 and her MFA from Stanford University in 2014. She’s a founding member of two artist-run alternative spaces in California, one a Mojave Desert based curatorial project and the other a floating venue for visual art, research and performance built atop a converted potato barge in the Sacramento River Delta

More information about Anja can be found HERE

Layla has a passion for water and access to nature for BIPOC individuals sparked the drive to create an event to connect the Santa Cruz community. A water engineer in the Astronomy and Astrophysics department at UCSC her research focuses on developing irrigation models and environmental education curricula for youth.

Water Fair 2024 at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Santa Cruz connects her research of water cycles and the environmental impacts to the systems caused by climate change that have occurred in the City of Santa Cruz. A platform to inform the public about water conservation and how they can help protect this natural resource. The water fair team includes Game Design Interns Dorothy Li, Derrick Lai and collaborations with Jennifer Parker UCSC OpenLab Creative Director.

Sarah Bird's artwork focuses on relationships with trees in the more than human world at a time of ecological crisis. These relationships comprise spaces inhabited, stories told and remembered, and beings growing and dying. Thinking through methods for being in relation to the arboreal world drives her work. These include attunement to place, the role of awe and affect, and multiple temporalities. Materials include photography, drawing, animation, and film.

More information about Sarah can be found HERE

Jorge Antonio Palacios is a researcher and artist who explores the intersections of environmental justice, technology, and borderlands. With an MA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, their research examines colonial histories and socio-environmental effects. They integrate ethnographic methods with innovative artistic practices, including installation and new media, to engage diverse audiences and drive critical discussions. Jorge is a graduate student in the UCSC Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program.

More information about Jorge can be found HERE

Derrick is currently a 3rd year undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. He is interested in the field of robotics and the many positive changes it can bring to the world. His interest also extends beyond the technicals, as he also enjoys game development as a creative outlet, such as designing gameplay and story elements to bring an immersive experience to allow people to see things from a new perspective.

Artist, writer, plant grower, UI/UX designer. Born in 1984 in Voronezh, Russia. Lived and worked in Saint Petersburg before leaving the country after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Currently studying Environmental Arts & Social Practice at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Ilia's life and professional interests lie in the liminal area between art, plant-growing, and natural philosophy. In installations, writings, online projects, educational programs, and communicative situations, I seek to initiate co-participation in the emergence of nature.

More information about Ilia can be found HERE

Alexa Burrell was born in San Francisco, CA. She is an experimental collage artist who weaves together field recordings, video composites, projections, animations, sculptures and archival materials to create lush fantastical and evocative narratives that compare the emotional and material, natural and technological, and scientific and spiritual.

Find out more HERE

Find out more HERE

Saul's passion for art and technology converged when he joined the Digital Arts and New Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Where he discovered the limitless possibilities of image-making through digital mediums. His mastery of the craft, combined with a deep understanding of design principles and elements, caught the attention of the faculty, leading to his appointment as a Graduate Student Instructor.

More information about Saul can be found HERE

Raty Syka (they/she), aka NUMPIE, is a graduate students in the Environmental Art & Social Practice MFA program at UC Santa Cruz. They are a comic artist and illustrator in with a background in sociocultural anthropology, folklore, and American Studies, Numpie makes comics and visual projects based on ethnographic research. Collaborative works highlight stories of agriculture in California - from the sustainable to the surprising.

More information about Raty can be found HERE

PLANETARY INDIGESTION is a multi-year series of conversations and performative lectures about food, ecology & biotechnology between the Center for Genomic Gastronomy (CGG), UC Santa Cruz faculty and non-institutional expert guests.

More information about the series can be found HERE

Kate Jaffe is an educator, weaver, sheep-shearer, quilter, flower gardener, daughter, friend, and partner. Her material practice centers around cloth-making and basket weaving from local materials such as wool, tule, willow, English ivy, nettle, redwood bark, and Japanese indigo from her garden. Kate is the founding Director of Santa Cruz KIN (Kids in Nature), est. 2013, a grassroots, land-based education program which teaches elementary students about the natural and cultural histories of Santa Cruz, alongside social and emotional learning and skill building.

More information about Kate can be found HERE

In their cross-species, cross-disciplinary, collaborative art project “Where Does the Cornfield End?” artists Kevin Corcoran, Fernanda Rappa, and Leslie Horwitz plan to engage in a number of artistic experiments. The project centers on the fate of a sick cornfield, rich with pathogens and parasites. At the site, in Grayson, CA, researchers are using eDNA to show the impact on biodiversity of creating a riparian buffer corridor around the industrially-farmed cornfield. Will this infusion work? We don’t know. We can only see fragments, in the language of DNA left over by generations of sex, death and rebirth. By studying how communities regenerate at the delineation of the two ecosystems, we can learn something about how to build bridges between emergent technologies and emergent strategies of community becoming. Through the languages of DNA, environmental sound, community engagement, and film, this project intends to demonstrate how translation is a transformative force that can talk back.

During her residency Simone  Johnson will engage in a year long creative research project focused on her water futures practice, which explores water and its relationship to understandings of time/temporality/space-time continuums and sense of place, particularly within the context of the Lower and Upper Basins in the western United States.

More information about Simone can be found HERE

Experimental and multidisciplinary professor, artist, and designer, with a particular interest in mixing emerging and traditional technologies. Currently, his research and creative practice is focused on environmental and social justice, as a founding member of The Algae Society, where he has been experimenting, designing and exhibiting work related to climate change and ocean acidification (www.algaesociety.org).

More information about  Jose Carlos Espinel HERE

Jingtian Zong is a multimedia artist interested in art's power as resistance and social mediation. In the forms of interactive installations, interventions, videos, and adapted objects, her recent work discusses surveillance, collective memories, displacement, and manipulated history in and beyond the contemporary People's Republic of China.

Jingtian's research project for the SIP program examines the complex relationship between gender and cyberspace, following the early spirit of cyberfeminism. Inquiries include: Could we escape gender in a virtual space? How do gender and the Internet shape each other? How does contemporary technology enable and, sometime, hinder revolutionary changes? Drawing inspiration from historical and recent cyberfeminism theories and practices, the SIP interns will learn how to conduct research and address their own understanding of gender and cyberspace through web art, audiovisuals, and other digital mediums.

More information about  the project please visit the site  HERE

During her high school internship, Talula worked with OpenLab to support art + science project development for k-5 grade curriculum as part of the Climate Action Lab initiative. Talula will attend the University of British Columbia, majoring in psychology in Fall 2023.

Annika’s work overlays fictional and documentary storytelling. Her practice fuses writing, animation, improvisation, performance, and collaboration with communities and individuals (in-person and online).

More information at https://art.ucsc.edu/people/annika-berry

Fourth-year UCSC undergraduate student double-majoring in Art and Film/Digital Media. As a screenwriter, cartoonist, and multimedia artist, her art normally uses dadaist techniques to explore, deconstruct, and satirize tradition through deliberate irrationality. She hopes to use her experience in OpenLab to further support research and make it more widely known and accessible to general audiences.

Food, Fertility, and Boarder Control: a multi-sensorial performance through the recent history of East Asian labor and consumption in the US.

Kim Ye (all pronouns, b. 1984, Beijing, China) is a Chinese American multi-disciplinary artist whose research-based practice encompasses performance, sculpture, video, installation, text, and social engagement. Their work engages gendered constructions around power, labor, and taboo by activating the artist/viewer dynamic to create situations of intimacy and exchange in public space.

More information about Kim Ye HERE

In collaboration with OpenLab and the Genomics Institute, The Greenhouse Project will host a series of conversations on GMOs and their complex role in organic and biodiverse farm/garden systems.

The Greenhouse Project is an intergenerational educational space that explores the relationship between art, food, and climate justice. Using a greenhouse as a metaphorical guide, where ideas can be seeded, tended to, and grow. The building of the space will be a series of workshops for students and the greater community to learn about sustainable building practices. The building sits on a 1-acre slope that will be a native grass and wildflower restoration site and a community garden, acting as another catalyst for hands-on educational workshops. The space intends to provide access to community and student-led teaching and learning experiences that center on the core themes of art, food, and climate justice. The site for the Greenhouse Project is the Center for Agroecology Farm at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It is organized by Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA candidates Dav Bell and L. Gilbert.

More about their project can be found HERE

An undergraduate at UC Berkeley studying Human Centered Design aspiring to become a Video Game Designer. She hopes to use her skills and experiences from childhood in Animation and Storytelling with her current interests and work in User Experience Research and Design to create engaging video games for change. As an intern for OpenLab, Zahra researched algae related to climate resilience focusing on edible species around the globe by creating a series of fun facts as digital art for social media that will launch in Fall 2022.

More information about Zahra can be found HERE

Rebecca Ora/rora is a mixed-media artist, performer and scholar based in California whose darkly humorous socially-engaged work explores comedy, discomfort, conflict, and the limits of "appropriate" representation of trauma.

More information at www.rebeccaora.net

Strives to create transformative communities responding to and generating paradigmatic shifts at the intersection of art-science-culture. Currently Annette is a Professor of Astronomy & Physics at St. Cloud State University (SCSU), an Honorary/Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in the Centre for Astrophysics, an Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, and a Professional Visual Artist.

https://annettelee.com

Supporting OpenLab projects including The Algae Society: Bio Art & Design Lab

A poet, critic, and multimedia artist. FREAKOPHONE WORLD (Inside the Castle, 2021) is their debut book of poetry and visual art. Their second book, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean. McCartha holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

More information at www.madisonmccartha.com

An Art Practitioner creating works in the intersection of technology and the environment. Her experience bridges the gap between arts marketing, curation and practice. Her portfolio of work spans out into Social Practice, Institutional Critique, Bio Art, Eco Art, New Media and Intervention Art and is the Senior Arts Manager for the City of San José

https://www.siembieda.com

A Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow.

https://dorothysantos.com/

An award-winning photographer born in Brazil and based in Spain. Her practice combines photography with sociological research and public participation in global defense of human rights. She is the creator of the internationally acclaimed Humanæ project—a collection of portraits that reveal the diverse beauty of humanity.

https://angelicadass.com/

Creates biological art, interactive sculptures and digital media works that explore interdependencies between technology, plants and animals. Her practice-based research involves entanglements with the non-human, constructing ecosystems, and seeing through the eyes of machines.

https://hypernatural.com

Meshi’s practice focuses on performance and AI technology. In her work she examines the influence of AI algorithms on our behavior and on our social environment. Following ideas of Posthuman Performativity, Meshi believes that agency emerges within the entanglement between the human and the non-human. She holds an MFA from The Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz and a BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She also holds a BSc and an MSc in Behavioral Biology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

http://www.avitalmeshi.com/

Ginas' art is about human form and function, developments in biotechnology, the intertwining histories of medicine, myth, history and ethics. Her work is a rich and deep tapestry of complex interwoven meaning  combining the biological how we feel the world with far more personal and sensual observation of how we touch and express ourselves in it.

https://www.ginaczarnecki.com/

A queer Ph.D. student in biomolecular engineering & bioinformatics, working in a genetics lab. Paloma studied the ways in which sex chromosomes have evolved in different animals. Paloma found that sex chromosomes, just like any part of DNA, changes over time. The idea that sex chromosomes changed over time shifted the way they think about sex from something stagnant to something dynamic and diverse.

https://www.jessiekb.com/looking-for-marla

An artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.

https://deweyhagborg.com/

Her interests in applied psychology and education drives an investigative lens into transforming my experiences of childhood and trauma into visual works. Together, the digital and the analog methods I use allow me to integrate personal symbolic themes and juxtapose these with the narrative.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalia-spritzer-18a3719a

Assistant Professor of Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Art & Design: Games & Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz, Darke also directs The Other Lab, an interdisciplinary, intersectional feminist research space for experimental games, XR, and new media.

https://danm.ucsc.edu/people/am-darke 

A scientist by training, Jessica's research has spanned a wide range of topics including oceanic geochemistry, octopus behavior, marine arthropod mating behavior, moray eel behavior, human sleep deprivation, and marine mammal neuroscience.

https://www.jessiekb.com

Aspiring UX Researcher & Designer with current goal of finding full time employment in HCI or Design with an emphasis on cognition + visual design. Through UX I aspire to develop tools that have a direct impact on comprehensively bettering peoples lives.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/silvana-moiceanu

Specializing in species interactions under climate change, Dr. Juniper Harrower works at the intersection of ecology, art, activism and policy. She uses rigorous science methods and a multimedia art practice to investigate human influence on ecological systems while seeking solutions that protect at-risk species and promote environmental justice.

https://www.juniperharrower.com

A multidisciplinary artist and designer, from Sofia, Bulgaria. He always looks for something new and unexpected in his work. Especially interested and curious to combine and use different materials with traditional techniques of painting and drawing, often with scientific articles as part of his creative pursuits and extensive research on a chosen topic.

https://ivaylohristov.art/about-me/

Artist, sculptor, fabricator and collaborator runs Santa Cruz StitchWorks

https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslie-thompson-a14a8582

Research interests: visual culture of Africa and its diasporas; French colonialism; memory and the archive(s) of slavery; performance; textiles, clothing and the body. The Collective Fabric project is meant to create a safe environment on the campus of the University of California Santa Cruz for students and faculty to come together and participate in the creation of a collective textile. http://placemaking-uc.org/project/the-collective-fabric-project/

Unseen California is founded by Karolina Karlic, Associate Professor of Photography at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Karlic is creative director, curator, and a participating artist. Working along side with collaborator, Joseph Gallegos, Assistant Professor of Film at California State University Los Angeles, the two artists share the intent to engage diverse audiences and foster urgent dialogue between the arts and ecology specially to the California landscape.

https://www.unseencalifornia.com

Research includes criminalization of poverty and homelessness, coercive mechanisms in the court system (e.g. plea bargaining and pretrial detention), PIC abolition.

The research team for this project is composed of Psychology graduate student Roxy Davis, Film and Digital Media professor Sharon Daniel, Sociology professor Jenny Reardon, and Sin Barras members Leslie Potenzo and Rebekah Mills.

Jails are spaces of exclusion where prisoners are rendered invisible to the general public. Their invisibility makes them vulnerable to neglect and subject to treatment that the general public would find unacceptable, if they could see it. http://placemaking-uc.org/project/preventable-deaths/

Working at the intersection of in placemaking, face-blindness, wellness architecture, facial recognition algorithms, and how art can make science more accessible – not necessarily in that order. The goal of this project was to explore the emotional connections people have with trees. Especially on campus, trees are the primary markers of place and central to the community’s identity. http://placemaking-uc.org/project/connecting-people-to-trees/

A Santa Cruz artist focused on social practice, sculpture, performance and new media work. He is deeply involved with community life, collectively organizing and serving on commissions, review boards, and nonprofit boards. A Secret History of American River People is a project to build a collection of personal stories of people who live and work on the river from the deck of a recreated mid-century shantyboat over a series of epic river voyages.

https://modes.io

An artist, curator, writer and farmer. She studied Ethnography & Art at the University of Hawai’i, and Painting at Claremont Graduate University, receiving a Masters of Fine Arts in 1988. Benish has also studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm (scholarship) and Academia del Bellas Artes in Mexico. Throughout the 1980’s Benish was engaged first-hand in the historical changes in Central Europe, culminating in an exchange exhibition of Czech and U.S. artists she co-curated in 1989, the first in fifty years. http://placemaking-uc.org/project/s-s-palo-alto-project/.

A visual artist and Associate Professor of Print Media at the Art Department  of the University of California in Santa Cruz. Originally from Recife Brazil, Leal has worked as a printmaker in the U.S.A. and Spain before receiving his B.F.A. from the Polytechnique University of Valencia, M.F.A. and PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Castilla La Mancha (UCLM), where he established the Print Media Area as a professor and researcher from 1998-2014.

https://www.enriqueleal.org        http://placemaking-uc.org/project/m-u-r-a-l-making-urgent-radical-art-league/

An artist and researcher exploring ideas of sonic consciousness. Her projects consider techniques of navigation, expanding perception beyond the range of human senses, the technological mediation of underwater environments and our relationship to other species. Walking is central to her practice, creating sound walks that awaken our perceptions within both natural and urban environments.

https://www.yolandeharris.net

An interactive, collaborative performance and lecture/discussion series. She hosted monthly events on campus to ‘check the temperature’ of a given site as part of an ongoing collaborative performance that creates space for discussion and reflection about the relationships between students, natural space, and this institution. https://placemaking-uc.org/project/temperature-check/

A. Laurie Palmer’s work is concerned with material explorations of matter’s active nature as it asserts itself on different scales and in different speeds, and with collaborating on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. Art Professors Laurie Palmer and Enrique Leal are supporting the M.U.R.A.L. (Making Urgent Radical Art League) project.

http://placemaking-uc.org/project/m-u-r-a-l-making-urgent-radical-art-league/

A hybrid artist exploring the intersections of interactive systems that bridge creative research and practice across Art, Science, Design & Education. Founding Director of Coaction Lab dedicated to the compulsive exploration of unstable relationships between organisms, environments and technology; examining site specific histories, stories and inspiration.

http://coactionlab.org

An emerging artist contemplating science, art, the environment, and climate change in her work. Through her artistic research practice, she seeks to create work that challenges viewers to become actively engaged and educated in environmental  issues with the hope that an informed public can help forge a more  sustainable society.

https://leonardo.info/contributor/58554/kathleen-deck

A multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on emerging relationships between technology and visual culture.

https://www.colleenjenningsart.com

An interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the geologic and non-linear time, the intersection of scientific inquiry and mysticism, and the hidden stories of everyday objects.

https://danm.ucsc.edu/people/ann-altstatt

Investigates new methods and perspectives on disseminating art historical museum collections for a contemporary audience and especially for new user groups, or the current "non- users". With a focus on media and senses in the museum experience, it is the goal to discover new ways in which cultural history and heritage can be relevantly revisited by people and communities of today.

https://pure.itu.dk/portal/en/persons/mia-falch-yates(53f3a454-f2a6-4700-9361-5fdbd52e8246).html 

A sound artist and musician synthesizing sound, music, and technology to explore new avenues of sonic expression and story telling.

http://scott-tooby.com/

Sean Pace is an artist from Asheville, North Carolina with a background in kinetic sculpture and social activism. His interests have been in energy, social and cultural development, and personal exploration of mechanics with reappropriated found objects, often obscuring meaning with charged metaphors and playful forms of hearsay.

https://danm.ucsc.edu/works_and_ideas/sean-pace-crawler-community-roving-artists-workshop-lab-educational-research

His research is on understanding the relationship between science and art through transdisciplinary collaborative processes.

https//:sciartica.net

Specializes in computer graphics, physics, digital art, fabrication, and architectural design. What unifies all of these is my passion for everything geometric. I'm currently interested in projects that mix machine learning, physically-based simulation, applied mathematics, computational geometry, and fabrication. I'm happiest when prototyping new ideas and pursuing novel research that makes full use of my diverse background.

https://wzcorse.com

Timothy Furstnau is a writer, artist, and curator based in Oakland, CA.  He received an MFA from the Digital Arts and New Media program at UCSC in 2016. His writing and text installations have appeared in many print venues and public spaces.

www.timothyfurstnau.com

An artist, curator, researcher, and organizer currently based in Brooklyn. Her recent projects deal with museums and public history, monuments and memorials, and the complex legacies of the Cold War. Andrea also works in the collective FICTILIS and the Center for Hydrosocial Studies, and is co-founder of the Museum of Capitalism. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Center For Capitalism Studies at The New School.

https://andreasteves.com

An electro-acoustic composer, improvisor, and tinkerer in sound, kinetic and interactive art. He has been called a professional bricoleur, junkyard maven and young audio-gadgeteer.

http://www.sudhutewari.com/Bio/ST_bio.html

An artist whose work crosses disciplines from installation and performance, to video and sound. His interdisciplinary works examine concepts of human perception and natural phenomena. Nathaniel’s current research is focused on astronomy and astrophysics, which deal with techniques of sonification and processes that attempt to expose our innate connection with the universe.

http://nathanielober.com/

Kristen Gillette is an artist-designer with a penchant for practical magic and results-driven mischief-making. This usually amounts to a mix of breaking down oppressive systems, challenging dominant narratives, time travel, and/or striving to reimagine and rebuild from multiple perspectives in Santa Cruz, the Bay Area and beyond.

https://art.ucsc.edu/faculty/kristin-gillette

Creates interactive, multimedia experiences that entertain, inform, and engage. I've done this as a designer, artist, curator, teacher, and manager, imagining, designing, prototyping, developing, organizing, and analyzing creative projects.

http://www.lefttomyowndevices.com

Support Oceanic Scales and Digital Arts and New Media MFA projects. Currently works as an experienced instructor, videographer, and social documentarian. Skilled in Curriculum Development, Cinematography, and Video Editing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriela-espinal-956154140

Born in Ouro Preto, Brazil, musical studies included –Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (1991) –Stockhausen Summer Courses (1999-2001) –Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut (2006-09) earning a Master of Arts in experimental composition (2009) and a Doctorate of Musical Arts (2015) at the University of California Santa Cruz (2009-15) algorithmic compositional track.

https://www.andremarquetti.com

Dr Aristea Fotopoulou works at the intersections of media & cultural studies with science & technologies studies. She has written about digital networks and feminism, and recently, on information politics, knowledge production, and digital engagement an currently is Principal Lecture (Associate Professor) in Media and Communication Studies, at the University of Brighton. She is the author of “FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND DIGITAL NETWORKS: Between Empowerment and Vulnerability”, published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan.

https://aristeafotopoulou.org

XR / Web Developer, main tools Unity / C# and React / WordPress. Based in Stockholm, Sweden and Berlin, Germany. Available globally – remote and on location.

https://joeldittrich.se/

Co-Taught the a couple of courses with Director Jennifer Parker as part of the OpenLab Mechatronic Collaborative Research cohort.

https://engineering.ucsc.edu/people/mteodorescu

Fabrication and electronics support for OpenLab/Co Action Lab Oceanic Scales project.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoe-manoguerra-073a8a82

Fabrication and technical support for OpenLab/Co Action Lab Oceanic Scales project.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandro-goena-3a164246/

Programming, visualization, and fabrication for  OpenLab/Co Action Lab Oceanic Scales project.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasmine-sien-39b77886

Programming for an Arduino-controlled LED-based visualization of California oceanographic data for OpenLab/Co Action Lab Oceanic Scales project.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-smith-73410158

Programming for an Arduino-controlled LED-based visualization of California oceanographic data for OpenLab/Co Action Lab Oceanic Scales project.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesshedel/

A multimedia artist, working in film, performance, electronics, sculpture, and light. She is a concept storyteller who creates interdisciplinary teams that explore topical issues through research, social experiments, and community engaged artworks.

http://www.oblskinc.com/who

A comparative ecophysiologist at the University of California- Santa Cruz. She is the Director of the Center for Marine Mammal Research and Conservation at UCSC. For the past 30 years her research has investigated the physiology of large mammalian predators.https://williams.eeb.ucsc.edu

Research to improve more effective communicate with the general public about science, as part of a study on Latex balloons, a major cause of death in marine turtles. Since graduate, Robin has become an Assistant Teaching Professor at UCSC as a physiological ecologist and instructor for the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department.

https://dunkin.eeb.ucsc.edu

A musician, composer and physicist. In 2008, he won the PRS Foundation New Music Award with Jane Grant and Nick Ryan for the development of a huge sonic installation across the UK entitled 'The Fragmented Orchestra'.

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/john-matthias-a674791b6

A high-end sound designer practicing globally, renowned for creating experiences that push the boundaries of listening and engage new audiences with audio.

https://www.nickryanmusic.com

I worked primarily with Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, Doug Lin, Erik Asphaug, and Stephan Rosswog. In 2013 I began my current stint at the ITC as an Einstein Fellow, and became an ITC fellow in 2016. In addition to my research, I designed Vox Charta, an astro-ph discussion website for astronomy and astrophysics departments, the Open Supernova Catalog, a complete catalog of supernova data, and the Open Tidal Disruption Catalog, a catalog of suspected tidal disruption events.

https://astrocrash.net/about-me/biography/

Research Assistant for Scalable Scientific Data Management in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory. Data visualization and analysis. Visualization Laboratory, Computer Science Department, UCSC, under direction of Prof. Alex Pang (UCSC) in collaboration with Dr. Katrin Heitmann (LANL) and Dr. Salman Habib (LANL).

https://www.linkedin.com/in/uliana-popov-bb08701/

Outreach officer - vSPL at Institut für Astrophysik, Department: Galaxies and cosmology Interstellar Medium and High z-QSOs, Universität Wien Mexico

A Public Outreach and Science Visualization Specialist for UC High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC). Currently a computer science PhD student at the University of Utah, studying Graphics and Scientific Visualization.

http://www.sci.utah.edu/~nmccurdy/

A postdoctoral researcher in the Astronomy and Astrophysics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My research involves developing and applying numerical techniques to study the physical process affecting solar system bodies small (moons, comets, asteroids) and large (Jupiter and Saturn).

https://www.linkedin.com/in/naor-movshovitz-246622b8/

Makes electronic feedback soundscapes using only discarded, obsolete and / or broken technology. It's a physical collaboration: the machines listen to themselves and and act accordingly. I offer suggestions to them and we make sound together. 2017 PhD, Music, Integrative Studies, University of California, San Diego

https://www.joecantrell.net/

A mixed race (Filipinx/White) artist with a research background in mathematics, feminist/postcolonial histories/futures of science/technology, and contemporary art. She serves as adjunct professor of Critical Studies (Math/Science) at the California College of the Arts, Media Studies at the University of San Francisco, and is a proud collaborator at IAFS, (it's a free school).

https://elizabethtravelslight.com/

An interdisciplinary artist working in the fields of interactive video, performative technology, and interaction design. His work is informed by years of practical experience inspiring passive audience members into active participation through Theater of the Oppressed techniques. He is interested in finding new modes of engagement with technology that encourage social interaction in public space.

https://www.behance.net/drewdetweiler

Research includes data visualization, scientific digitization with machine learning methods, image processing. Studied feedback in star clusters with numerical simulations, and later simulations of galaxy formation at UC Santa Cruz.

http://www.astronaiman.com

Research Interests include asteroid and comet geophysics, Mars surface evolution, planetary collisions of all kinds, and the origin of planets, satellites, meteorites and their parent bodies. I am also interested in spacecraft exploration of comets and asteroids, and zero gravity experiments to understand the rheology and petrology of small bodies and accreting planetesimals..

https://eps.ucsc.edu/faculty/Profiles/emeriti.php?uid=easphaug

A machine learning scientist with a focus in recommender systems, committed to building science literacy and promoting technical careers. I have experience teaching children and adults; managing programs and teams; and organizing large career development events.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairedorman/

Interested in galaxies as sites of chemical evolution where heavy elements are synthesized in stars. These heavy elements are directly related to the complexity, diversity, and richness of life on Earth.

https://www.astro.ucsc.edu/faculty/index.php?uid=pguhatha

An artist and educator in Santa Cruz, California, where he lives with his partner, Madeline Lane-McKinley, and their daughter Tuli. Works as a Program Manager at Stanford University School of Medicine.

http://www.kylemckinley.com/

An art student and designer, Jack O'Neill was instrumental in supporting and developing OpenLab contributing to the logo design, website development, adapting research spaces in both the arts and science, and creating the first exhibition catalogs with art student Amy Boewer. Both were key players in the development of the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center bringing a wealth of student perspective and talent.

An art student and designer, Amy Boewer was instrumental in supporting and developing OpenLab contributing to the logo design, website development, adapting research spaces in both the arts and science, and creating the first exhibition catalogs with Jack O'Neill. Both were key players in the development of the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center bringing a wealth of student perspective and talent.