Ari Melenciano is a research artist and technocultural theorist investigating forms of intelligence that elude the machine, and cultural behavior as an emergent cybernetic field.
She has taught courses in new media technologies, design, critical theory, and culture at institutions including New York University, Pratt Institute, Hunter College, and Parsons School of Design. Her work has been presented internationally at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai, and in the permanent collection of the Museum of Moving Image.
In 2017, while a graduate student at NYU ITP, Melenciano founded
Afrotectopia, a social institution dedicated to cultivating and expanding Black imagination and culture through art, design, and technology. Afrotectopia has taken the form of festival-conferences, think tanks, free summer camp for middle and high school students, free adult education in creative technology and theory, international fellowship program funding imaginative research by descendents of the pan-African diaspora, multi-university (MIT and NYU) commissioned incubator, a speculative design book publisher, and university exhibition.
Previously, she worked as a creative technologist at Google’s Creative Lab, contributing to projects spanning machine learning on fingertip-scale hardware; and research, strategy, and product development with generative AI and Responsible AI teams.
Ari Melenciano has lectured at dozens of universities and cultural institutions around the world including Harvard, MIT Media Lab, the Design Academy Eindhoven, the Lincoln Center, and Armenia’s TUMO Center for Creative Technologies. She has designed
culturally relevant curriculum for NYC’s Department of Education, and Apple’s community mentorship programs, and has consulted for Creative Capital, Eyebeam, and commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts on community design and creative ecosystems. She has also taught and mentored young technologists at NYC’s Lower East Side Girls Club and the New York Urban League, as well as being a mentor at the New Museum’s New Inc.