Mona Kasra is an Iranian American new media artist, interdisciplinary scholar, and associate professor of digital media design at the University of Virginia. Her practice-based research questions, critiques, and experiments with the affordances of media technologies within artistic forms and in a variety of improvisational framings. She frequently collaborates with artists, musicians, choreographers, and theater-makers to explore the confluence between performance and new media, particularly the emerging aesthetic possibilities for enriching narrative and enhancing audience immersion in live events. Kasra’s artwork has been exhibited widely in galleries and film festivals across the United States and worldwide, and she has juried, curated, and programmed for many exhibitions, film festivals, and conferences. Her recent virtual reality piece Dwelling in the Enfolding, in collaboration with composer Matthew Burtner, was exhibited at Anchorage Museum of Art and ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community (DAC) exhibition The Earth, Our Home: Art, Technology, and Critical Action. This interactive, immersive experience alludes to the complex relationship between humans and nature/environment, problematizing the possessive notion of the earth as ‘our’ home.  

Francesca Tripodi is a sociologist and information scholar, interested in understanding how society interacts and engages with information systems and participatory platforms (e.g., Wikipedia, Facebook, YikYak, Search Engines, etc.). She combines ethnographic observations with scraped metadata to expose what scholars refer to as “sociotechnical vulnerabilities.” The goal of Tripodi's research is to demonstrate how inequality and misinformation are often hiding in plain sight.

She is an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science and a principal investigator at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill.

David Nemer is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies, and an affiliate faculty in anthropology and the Latin American studies program at the University of Virginia. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society (BKC) and a Visiting Scholar at The Institute for Rebooting Social Media (RSM)- both at Harvard University. His research and teaching interests cover the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology of Technology, ICT for Development (ICT4D), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Nemer is an ethnographer whose fieldworks include the Slums of Vitória, Brazil; Havana, Cuba; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022)- winner of the Marcel Roche Book Award from ESOCITE, and Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013). He holds a MA in Anthropology from the University of Virginia, an MS in Computer Science from Saarland University, and a Ph.D. in Computing, Culture, and Society from Indiana University. Nemer has written for The Guardian, El País, The Huffington Post (HuffPost), Salon, The Intercept_, UOL, and CartaCapital.