Holly Willis is the Chair of the Media Arts + Practice Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and studies reconfigurations of cinema and experimental media. She also co-directs the AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS) initiative of the USC Center for Generative AI & Society and is a hybrid scholar/practitioner integrating critical theory and media production primarily using video, still images, and sound as forms of critical making. She is the author of Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts; New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image; and Bjork Digital, and the co-founder of Filmmaker Magazine dedicated to independent film, and former editor of RES Magazine and co-curator of RESFEST. She writes frequently for diverse publications about experimental film, video, and new media, and her work has appeared in as Film Comment, Afterimage, ArtWeek, Variety and The Normal School.

Mike Ananny is an Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism and Affiliated Faculty of Science, Technology, and Public Life at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.  He studies how sociotechnical cultures create the digital news, algorithmic systems, and artificial intelligence infrastructures that structure public life.  He co-directs the interdisciplinary USC collective Media As SocioTechnical Systems (MASTS), the Sloan Foundation project Knowing Machines (with Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz), and the AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS) initiative of the USC Center on Generative AI and Society.  He is the author of Networked Press Freedom (MIT Press), co-editor (with Laura Forlano and Molly Wright Steenson) of Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press), and publishes in various interdisciplinary venues including Journalism Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Internet Studies.  He was a postdoctoral scholar at Microsoft Research, and holds a PhD from Stanford University and a Masters from the MIT Media Laboratory.  He regularly writes for popular press outlets including The Atlantic, WIRED, Harvard's Nieman Lab, and the Columbia Journalism Review.

Dr. Ziyaad Bhorat is a South African political theorist focused on automation and AI, global digital governance, and democratic politics. He is an Associate Director at the Center for Generative AI & Society, and a visiting scholar at the Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life (STPL). He is also the country lead for the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computing Challenge in the US and South Africa. He holds a doctorate in Political Science (Political Theory) from UCLA, his MSc+MBA from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and has worked in digital media and telecoms industries across Sub-Saharan Africa. Ziyaad was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at STPL; the Berggruen Institute; and a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He has researched and written on topics ranging from Aristotelian virtue ethics to AI judges for academic journals as well as media outlets in the U.S., UK and South Africa.

Scott Fisher is Professor of Media Arts + Practice and former Dean of Research in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is also the Founding Chair of the Interactive Media Division and Director of the Mobile & Environmental Media Lab.   Fisher has worked extensively since the early 80s to develop virtual reality and augmented reality systems at NASA Ames, Atari Research Labs, MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (now the MIT Media Lab) and at Keio University in Japan. As a Research Scientist at NASA Ames, his lab played a pioneering role in developing several virtual reality technologies that form the basis for products commercially available today.

Rohan Grover is a PhD student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. His research examines data privacy laws in action with a particular focus on the sociotechnical construction of “user consent” in privacy engineering. His work has been published in New Media & Society, Political Communication, Telecommunications Policy, Information, Communication & Society, and the Asian American Policy Review. Prior to returning to academia, Rohan worked as a product manager and data strategist in digital media and politics. He holds an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU and a BS in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Grace Huang is a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Communication, Leadership, and Policy. She received her MSc and MA from the London School of Economics and USC Annenberg as part of LSE and USC’s Global Media and Communications joint master’s program. Having a passion for AI governance and infrastructure studies, Grace actively engages with AI policies and digital platform innovations from both technological and sociological perspectives.

Andrea Shinyoung Kim is a PhD student in the Media Arts + Practice Program at USC. Trained in documentary filmmaking and feminist theory, Kim follows traditions of experimentation with emerging technologies using critical, performative, and co-creative approaches. She has written on virtual embodiment, medical objectivity, and XR arts praxis, and currently researches virtual identity and generative folklore. Kim holds an M.Sc from the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and B.A. from the Duke Literature Program. She has served on selection committees for the Fulbright Association and Peabody Awards and has worked previously with the U.S. Embassy in Rabat, MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, and Seoul Institute of the Arts.