Assia Boundaoui is a Co-Creation Journalism Fellow at ODL, 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. 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.

Carla LynDale Bishop is the first ever recipient of the MIT & Black Public Media Fellowship, hosted by MIT Open Documentary Lab and sponsored by MIT Center for Art, Science, & technology. She is a filmmaker and assistant professor in Digital Storytelling at The University of Oklahoma. Currently, she is producing an immersive geo-locative media project titled, “Mapping Blackness”.

Gabriel Mário Velez is a Colombian visual and interdisciplinary artist, professor, and researcher. This semester, he will continue to develop his project Transeuntis Mundi, which intends to capture the sound and visual memory of people, cultures, and cities to tell the story of the millennials that have been traveling the world.

Gabriel Vieira-Posada is a filmmaker, screenwriter, photographer, and a professor at the University of Antioquia, where he co-founded the Master in Audiovisual Studies and Creation program as well as the TVLab for research on “edutainment” issues. This semester, he will work on a participatory project that will address the creation of a media strategy to unlock child abuse practices through co-creation and immersive storytelling.

Giulia Taurino is a media scholar, digital humanist, and computational artist. She works at the intersection of internet studies, digital humanities and knowledge design. While at ODL, Giulia Taurino will work on a project for narrating digital databases and their social impact through the use of creative coding and human-driven database design.

Joanna Wright is a documentarian and visual artist from Wales, where she is senior lecturer in media at the department of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, Bangor University. This year, she will continue to work on a co-created, multi platform documentary “Field Guide for a National Park” as well as collaborating on an immersive project about photonics (the science of light) which is being developed for sight-impaired audiences.

Kendall Moore, PhD, is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a professor in the departments of Journalism and Film Media at the University of Rhode Island. This year, she will work on a documentary film that will explore the origins and evolution of western science as a western European enterprise, one that marginalized and re-narrativized the practices, procedures, ethics, and contributions of the racially marginalized, underrepresented people of color in science today.

Penelope Jagessar Chaffer is a multi-award winning filmmaker, TED speaker, creative technologist and global environmentalist. In addition to her project “Toxic Baby”, her Sundance/Johns Hopkins residency pregnancy project, Penelope will be developing her interactive piece, “The Chemistry of Racism”, which explores the systematic poisoning of the black body, connecting the dots between color, Covid, and the criminal justice system.

Yucef Merhi is an artist, coder, researcher, and curator, interested in raising cultural awareness through technology and language. This year, he will be conducting research on how to reduce electronic waste by framing outdated technologies as artistic endeavors. Yucef has called this approach “Retrocycling”.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist and technologist who creates playful work with XR, VR, AI, AR, and other esoteric systems of story and code. This year, she will work on ethics based dependencies for software development through a lens of indigeneity as a Mozilla Fellow embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, and she will share more about Wampum.codes podcast at this year’s ImagineNATIVE Festival and the Indigenous Digital Delegation at MIT.

Cindy Bishop returns to ODL to pursue a couple of ongoing projects including Chomsky vs. Chomsky and The Dinner Party, as well as to discover new narrative deployments for her new startup, Bongo Media, a conversational storytelling platform, of which she is Director of Technology.

Danny Goldfield is a photographer and designer. This year, he is working with ODL to build a rear screen projection system in the lobby of the MIT Kresge Auditorium in order to create a safe outdoor event space for students during the pandemic. He is also producing a video series with the MIT Cadlab in order to introduce their Product Engineering Processes to a wider audience of makers and entrepreneurs.

Joshua Glick is an assistant professor of English and Film & Media Studies at Hendrix College and affiliate faculty at Columbia University. This year, Dr. Glick will be developing a learning module based on the deepfake art installation, In Event of Moon Disaster. Supported through a grant from MIT’s World Education Lab, the module will explore media literacy in the age of disinformation. He will also be co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Documentary with Pat Aufderheide.

Nadav Assor is an associate professor of Expanded Media at Connecticut College’s Studio Art department and is the Director of the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology there. During the coming months, he will continue his work on several collaborative projects, all dealing with negotiating human intimacy, security and ritual while living an ever more fragmented and precarious life.