Ben Fry is principal of Fathom, a design and software consultancy located in Boston. He received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. During the 2006–2007 school year, Ben was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. In 2011, he won the National Design Award for Interaction Design from the Cooper-Hewitt. With Casey Reas, Fry initiated Processing in 2001.
All Streets by Fathom Information Design
Lauren McCarthy (p5.js lead) is an artist based in Los Angeles whose work explores current social and technological systems and structures for being a person and interacting with other people. Lauren has exhibited at Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, LACMA, and the Japan Media Arts Festival, and worked on installations for the London Eye, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT. She is an Assistant Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. Lauren joined the Processing Foundation’s Board of Directors in 2015.
Social Soul by Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald
Casey Reas is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. He has exhibited, screened, and performed his work in galleries and museums around the world. Reas is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences as well as a bachelor’s degree from the School of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. With Ben Fry, Reas initiated Processing in 2001.
Network D by Casey Reas
Johanna Hedva is a Korean-American genderqueer disabled artist and writer from Los Angeles, who now lives in Berlin. Hedva joined the Processing Foundation in 2014, motivated by their political activism in intersectional feminism, anti-white-supremacy, anticapitalism, and for the rights of LGBTQIA+, disabled, and neurodivergent people from all backgrounds. Hedva is committed to open-source philosophy and practice, decolonial politics and action, and to promoting the attenuation of the boundaries between creative disciplines of all kinds.
Motherload by Johanna Hedva
Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer, editor, and curator whose research interests include digital art, computational media, and biotechnology. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco and received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Her work appears in art21, Art Practical, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Ars Technica, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She serves as a co-curator for REFRESH and is the program manager for Processing Foundation.
Phoenix Perry creates physical games and user experiences. Her work looks for opportunities to bring people together to raise awareness of our collective interconnectivity. A consummate advocate for women in game development, she founded Code Liberation Foundation. Code Liberation catalyzes the creation of digital games and creative technologies by women, nonbinary, femme, and girl-identifying people to diversify STEAM fields. Since starting in 2012, this project has helped to foster a new generation of creators. Currently, she is a Lecturer in Physical Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
photo credit: Emi Spicer
Taeyoon Choi is an artist and educator based in New York and Seoul. His art practice involves performance, electronics, drawings, and storytelling that often leads to intervention in public spaces. Choi collaborates with fellow artists, activists, and professionals from other fields to realize socially engaged projects and alternative pedagogy. He was an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has published books about urbanism and is currently working on a book of drawings about computation. Choi cofounded the
School for Poetic Computation in 2013, where he continues to organize and teach. Recently, he's been focusing on unlearning the wall of disability and normalcy, and enhancing accessibility and diversity within art and technology.
Signing Coders Workshop by Taeyoon Choi.