Larisa Mann / DJ Ripley: Larisa is a Fellow, Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies, at Berkeley Law, her research for a forthcoming PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy) situates a specific local culture of music-making within modern global colonial capitalism through examining music-making’s relationship to copyright law. As Larisa, she will give a dorkbot presentation on her research.

Matt Gray was born in Australia, grew up in Canada, the UK, Australia, Singapore & Hong Kong. He trained as an actor, and worked in Canada the UK and the States as Actor, Director and Sound Designer. He has taught acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and Carnegie Mellon. In addition to teaching acting, Matt has directed theatrical productions across Europe, including Edinburgh, London, Amsterdam & Berlin. Since arriving in Pittsburgh, Matt has been exploring the role of technology in live performance. He continues to direct ‘conventional’ theatrical productions, including CRIME & PUNISHMENT and Harold Pinter’s THE HOTHOUSE, both at Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre (PICT). Matt’s current interests involve artificial intelligence in performance and the history of performance pedagogy as a testing/coding platform for new technology.

Suzie is an artist working primarily in video, sound and performance. Silver’s work has exhibited and screened widely nationally and internationally at venues including The Whitney Museum of Art, The New Museum, Documenta, ICA Boston, Pacific Film Archives, Anthology Film Archives, London Film Festival, and the Seoul Film Festival. Currently, Silver is Associate Professor in Electronic and Time Based Art in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Suzie will present a brief overview of three related recent and/or current projects exploring science fiction, space age abstraction, vaudeville in space and non-humanoid alien sexuality.

Amisha is a Pittsburgh-based artist interested in curious creatures and their unique adaptations, from swarming patterns and elegant defense mechanisms, to superorganisms and animals of the deep sea. She is currently developing a series of "animal homunculus" drawings to visually compare differences in sensory and motor adaptations in the animal kingdom, and a new animal-inspired defensive costume to partner her blowfish, porcupine and skink dresses, this time inspired by ink-squirting cephalopods. Through her drawings, videos, and kinetic wearables, Amisha aims to inspire curiosity in her hand-picked wonders of the world.

Heather Knight - Heather is a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and founder of Marilyn Monrobot, which creates socially intelligent robot theater performances. Her installations have been featured at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, LACMA, Pop!Tech, SIGGRAPH, Mindshare LA, TEDxUSC and Fortezza da Basso. Her work also includes; robotics, and instrumentation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, interactive installations with Syyn Labs (including an award-winning Rube Goldberg Machine music video with OK GO), and sensor design at Aldebaran Robotics. She is an alumnus from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, earning her bachelors and masters in Electrical Engineering at MIT.