ChoreoTech Lab | Program Director
July 22 – July 28
Heidi Boisvert (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist, and academic researcher who interrogates the neurobiological and socio-cultural effects of media and technology. Simply put, she studies the role of the body, the senses, and emotion in human perception and social change.
She founded and serves as the Creative Director of futurePerfect Lab, a think-do tank that harnesses the power of pop culture, emerging technology and neuroscience to ignite social change. Currently, she is mapping the world’s first media genome, while taking great care with its ethical implications, as detailed in her 2019 TED Talk. She also architects expanded reality and transmedia storytelling experiences, and devises large-scale networked dance and theatre using biocreative technology.
Boisvert’s work has been shown nationally and internationally at EMPAC, New York Live Arts, Banff, the New Museum, Queen’s Museum, ComicCon, Waag, and Kunsthalle. Her 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.
She was formerly the Multi-Media Director at Breakthrough, a global human rights organization, where she 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. She also co-
founded XTH, an open-source, creative, and bio-wearable start up with Marco Donnarumma.
Boisvert received her Ph.D. in the Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her dissertation explored how embodied, bio-adaptive, game-based networked performance practices could serve as an antidote to intelligent technologies’ slow violence, 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, she researches and develops open-source tools to increase empathetic engagement. She 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 sits on the advisory board of American Documentary POV Spark.
Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of AI and the Arts with a focus on Immersive Performance Technologies at the University of Florida’s College of the Arts, School of Theatre and Dance. She was previously the Director of the Emerging Media Technology program at the City University of New York, where she taught advanced courses in experimental game design, mixed reality, and immersive worlds, tangible media and biomedia. She is also a member of the NEW INC’s 6th and 7th cohort in the Creative Science track and a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects. Presently, she co-curates EdgeCut, a live performance series that explores human-digital relationships and is working with David Byrne on Theater of the Mind, an immersive theater piece for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, as a Technology Designer. For more information, please visit https://www.heidiboisvert.com/.
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