Ari Melenciano has cultivated an expansive practice within the arts, technology, design, culture, and pedagogy. Her natural ability to combine many disciplines reveals their interconnectedness and reimagines their conventions for new possibilities. Her art practice ranges from using improvisational dance as an ethnomusicological research instrument, to exploring AI through both critical and imaginative lenses, to sonic composition using botanical data. Her work has been exhibited around the world from Dubai's Museum of the Future to the Studio Museum in Harlem. She's a frequent international public speaker, and occasionally designs and teaches courses at New York University, Hunter College, Parsons, and the Pratt Institute.
She's the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution that imagines new possibilities at the nexus of art, design, technology, and culture. Afrotectopia has taken many forms including festivals, think tanks, summer camp, adult continued education programming, international residency, and incubators. Currently, Afrotectopia is on a book tour to promote their recently published kitchen table art book titled, Black Metal, which came out of an incubator between Afrotectopia, MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative, and NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. And previously, she was a creative technologist at Google's Creative Lab. Some work she did while at Google included creating technologies using machine learning on hardware devices the size of a finger, contributing creative direction for the Google for Africa campaign, and creative strategy for generative AI development.
CV, here.