Ari Melenciano is an artist and researcher whose practice investigates cultural behavior as a dynamic cybernetic field. She positions the self as an epistemic and ontological site, and elevates invisible intelligences as co-authors to perception. Whether she is composing botanical soundscapes or crafting intuitive choreographies that use the body as a cultural research instrument, her practice designs new grammars for understanding what it means to exist, through the remembrance of ancestral interfaces. Ari's inquiries invite us to consider imagination as simultaneously a tool to excavate interiority, expand the performance of culture, and recover what the archive has forgotten.


She has taught courses in new media technologies, design, critical theory, and culture across NYU, the Pratt Institute, Hunter College, Parsons School of Design, and Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai.  And, she is the founder of Afrotectopia, a pioneering social institution that cultivates and expands Black imagination and culture at the nexus of art, design, and technology. Afrotectopia has taken the form of festivals, think tanks, an international fellowship, multi-university incubator, and speculative design book publisher. 


Previously, she worked as a creative technologist at Google’s Creative Lab, where she contributed to projects ranging from machine learning on fingertip-scale hardware to creative direction for the Google for Africa campaign, and generative AI research strategy.