I am an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist, and academic researcher who interrogates the neurobiological and socio-cultural effects of media and technology. Simply put, I study the role of the body, the senses, and emotion in human perception and social change.
I founded and serve as the CEO and Creative Director of futurePerfect Lab, a boutique creative agency that harnesses the power of pop culture, emerging technology and neuroscience to ignite social change. Currently, we are mapping the world’s first media genome. To learn more about this research watch my TED Talk, How I’m using biological data to tell better stories and spark social change.
I was formerly the Multi-Media Director at Breakthrough, a global human rights organization, where I designed, developed and virally propagated a wide range of new media and pop culture campaigns that helped raise awareness and instigate policy change on pressing social issues.
I created the first 3D social change game, ICED I Can End Deportation, to shift the frame around unfair U.S. immigration policies. ICED was downloaded by over 250,000 players in 166 countries, and earned tremendous media attention (23 newspapers, 134 blogs, 295 radio broadcasts, 68 television broadcasts, and 76 internet news & search engines). I also designed America 2049, a groundbreaking alternative reality game on Facebook about pluralism, featuring Harold Perrineau (LOST), Victor Garber (ALIAS), Cherry Jones (24), Anthony Rapp (RENT) and the comedian Margaret Cho, which nominated for a Games for Change Award and Katerva Award. My work has been featured in Kotaku, TIME, Wired, Salon, Fast Company, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, MTV, NPR and the Huffington Post, to name a few.
I also co-founded XTH, an open-source creative bio-wearable start up with Marco Donnarumma. We were awarded Harvestworks' Creativity + Technology = Enterprise Fellowship through support by the Rockefeller Foundation.
I have been an artist-in-residence at Banff New Media Institute, the Waag Society, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Sante Fe Art Institute, and served as a new media mentor for both the National Latino Producer's Academy and BAVC Producer's Institute.
I received my Ph.D. in the Electronic Arts program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My research interrogates the socio-cultural and neurobiological impacts of media and intelligent technology, and also explores how embodied, bio-adaptive, game-based networked performance practices can serve as an antidote, restoring critical feeling.
As a Media Impact Fellow at The Harmony Institute, a Fellow at the MIT DocLab, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Norman Lear Center (based at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication) I continued to research and develop open-source tools to increase empathetic engagement.
I was selected as the American Arts Incubator Ambassador in Turkey for the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and ZERO1, and sit on the advisory board of American Documentary POV Spark, which focuses on bringing public media to the 21st century, and on the board of the Global Action Project, a 25-year old youth media organization.
Currently, I am an Assistant Professor of AI and the Arts: Immersive Performance Technologies at the University of the Florida, College of the Arts, School of Theatre and Dance. I was previously the Director of the Emerging Media Technology program at the New York City College of Technology (CUNY) where I taught advanced courses in experimental game design, mixed reality & immersive worlds, tangible media and biomedia. I am also a member of the New Inc’s 6th and & 7th cohort in the Creative Science track, and have been working with David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar on Theater of the Mind, an immersive theater piece for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, as a Technology Designer.
Please view my CV for more information or ping me: heidijboisvert@gmail.com.