University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Using art and design as a vehicle for social justice and civic engagement, Stacy Asher designs interactive and traditional print media. Her creative work includes service to the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – Off Site Exhibitions, and she has designed exhibitions and publications for international fine art expositions in Miami, Chicago, New York and Hong Kong. Recent exhibitions include Southern Exposure and the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco. Asher was previously faculty in the Department of Design and Industry at San Francisco State University, and in the Department of Art & Architecture at the University of San Francisco where she taught a variety of graphic design courses, including Typography, Design + Social Change, Publication Design, and Advanced Graphic Design. Asher has also served as Assistant Professor at Ohio University School of Art. She received her MFA in Design from California College of the Arts.

Ash Smith is a speculative artist, designer and researcher who creates stories for film, stage and immersive play. She comes to Nebraska from the University of California at San Diego, where she was a lecturer and the associate director of their Art and Technology program. In her work, Smith incorporates strategies of play and speculation to solve problems, re-imagine systems and build worlds to create interactive stories, mixed reality experience, simulations and prototypes of the future. In addition to teaching, Smith works on the speculative design team at Hyundai’s The Design Lab, where her pioneering work focuses on robotaxis and microbility. Smith received her Master of Fine Arts in visual arts from the University of California at San Diego and a Master of Arts in performance studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She received her Bachelor of Arts in media and technology studies and media production from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Robert Twomey is an artist and engineer exploring the poetic intersection of human and machine perception. He exploits the potential of new technologies while critically revealing their limits. Engaged with the messy conditions of everyday life, his works ask questions about our technologies and ourselves to reveal moments of insight and points of failure. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination (UCSD) and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University. Twomey has worked in a variety of research labs throughout his career, notably the Center for the Study of Learning, the Center for Research and Computing and the Arts with Sheldon Brown, the Experimental Design Lab with Natalie Jeremijenko, and the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Twomey has presented his work at SIGGRAPH (where he won best Art Paper in 2017), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Seattle Art Museum, the Athens Digital Arts Festival, and has been featured by Microsoft and the Seattle Times. His research has been funded by NVIDIA and Amazon. Twomey received his BS from Yale with majors in art and biomedical engineering, his MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and his Ph.D. in digital arts and experimental media from the University of Washington. He comes to the Carson Center after being a postdoc with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination and a lecturer in electrical and computer engineering, data science and visual arts at UCSD.

Jesse Fleming is the founding director of the Perceptual Technologies Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts. As a multi-sensory and interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator he focuses on tools, experiences, and artworks as vehicles for self awareness, discovery, and interconnection. Fleming is an internationally exhibited artist and filmmaker. His work has shown at commercial galleries, public spaces, nonprofit galleries and cultural institutions, such as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, Turkey; The National Film Museum of Frankfurt Germany; The San Francisco Symphony; the Walt Disney Concert Hall, University of California at Los Angeles, and The Hammer Museum, all in Los Angeles; Landmarks at the University of Texas at Austin; and Creative Time in New York City. Fleming’s artwork is in the permanent collection of the Cedars-Sinai Collection, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, Turkey; and the Rutter Family Art Foundation in Norfolk, Virginia. As a filmmaker in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Fleming has directed works with musicians, Sigur Ros, Lykke Li, Fools Gold, and Explosions in the Sky; with artists Doug Aitken, Laura Owens, Matthew Barney, Kerry Tribe, Francesco Vezzoli, Cyprian Gaillard, Mark Lecky, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Merce Cunningham and Daniel Arsham; and for institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York; The Guggenheim in New York; The Getty, Moca in Los Angeles; and The Hammer Museum, New York Times and Bloomberg TV. Fleming has a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA’s Design Media Arts Department and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in New Genres. He also has a teaching credential from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

Anna Henson is an artist and researcher working in embodied and social interaction design for spatial computing and immersive experiences. She creates and prototypes interactions, environments, and user journeys which center participant agency, new narratives, and unite our digital and physical worlds. Henson’s creative research focuses on XR (mixed reality), volumetric capture, and new forms of storytelling. Henson has a Masters of Science in Computational Design (XR, Interaction & Experience Design, Volumetric Capture) from Carnegie Mellon University; a B.S.S. in Fine Art from Cornell College; and an M.F.A. from the Glasgow School of Art where she was also the recipient of the Emerging Artist Award. Interdisciplinary to her very core, Henson has a long career as an educator; a creative producer for tech startups, VR companies, and experiential agencies; as well as a decade plus career as a projection and media designer for Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional theatres.

Jinku Kim has over 15 years of experience working as an educator and multidisciplinary artist. He has extensive experience in audio-visual production and digital art, including audio-visual performance and installations, hardware and software design, and site-specific projects, as well as digital modeling and fabrication. Kim has taught undergraduate/graduate courses, including audio-visual narrative, and hardware and software instrument design. His works have been performed and installed at REDCAT in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, STEIM in Amsterdam, and The New Children’s Museum in San Diego, among others. Kim has a Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia from Brown University; an M.F.A. in Integrated Media and Experimental Sound Practice from California Institute of the Arts; and a B.M. Professional Music: Electronic Production and Design from Berklee College of Music.