We are thrilled to introduce our new OpenDocLab Fellows who will be (virtually) joining us at MIT this semester:
shirin anlen 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. While at OpenDocLab, she will work on to be changed, an interactive webAR novella about living with many realities.
Ngardy Conteh George (MIT & Black Public Media Fellow) is an award-winning Sierra Leonean-Canadian filmmaker committed to working with underrepresented communities, especially those that represent the rich cultures and complexities of the African Diaspora. Her films include TV hour Mr. Jane and Finch (winner of two Canadian Screen Awards) and Sundance Documentary Film Fund supported feature-length documentary The Flying Stars. While at OpenDocLab, she will work on Wa’Omoni Rising, a cinematic VR documentary experience exploring Barbudan culture and African indigenous knowledge through the perspective of Barbudan Canadian Philman George.
Tamara Shogaolu is the founder and creative director of Ado Ato Pictures. She is an international director and new media artist who strives to share stories across mediums, platforms, and virtual and physical spaces in order to promote cross-cultural understanding and challenge preconceptions. She has a track record of featuring her work at film festivals, galleries, and museums worldwide. While at OpenDocLab, she will work on 40-acres, a re-imagining of quilting as a form of storytelling and an oral history driven interactive documentary exploring the connection between various generations of Black farmer communities and the land.
Andrea Walls (MIT & Black Public Media Fellow 2021) is a conceptual artist using a genre-inclusive, multimedia approach to storytelling. Her work as a poet, photographer and digital artist is informed and inspired by the writers and visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, Ultraviolet Catastrophe, and the digital web-collection, The Black Body Curve and isthe creator/curator of the interactive web-experiences and community archives, The D’Archive.com and Museum of Black Joy™. While at OpenDocLab, Andrea is working on The Museum of Black Joy, an interactive archive, a hybrid exhibition space and living document of non-traumatic Black Life in Philadelphia and beyond.
Richard Wormser has been making documentary films since the 1970s. He is the originator, series producer, and co-director/writer of the four-part national PBS television series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, the story of the African American struggle for freedom during the era of segregation from 1880 to 1954. The series received the prestigious Peabody Award for excellence in television programming, three national Emmy nominations, and the International Documentary Association Best Series award. While at OpenDocLab, he will work on Reaching for the Moon, a living history, interactive website for public schools on the African American struggle against racial segregation and for civil rights and social justice from 1870 to 2021.
