“I Use new kinds of technology to tell new kinds of stories. Specifically, I’m interested in science storytelling around environmental futures. My main area of ecological research is water. I stand with those who defy categorization. We are prototyping just futures, in places that do not exist. for people they will one day be, for the liquid, the hybrid, the cyber, the unreal.”
-Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Artist Statement 2023
About
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is also the founder of the AI Climate Justice Lab, the Talk To Me About Water Collective, and the Stupid Hackathon.
In 2022 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Award as part of the Sundance AOP Fellowship cohort for her project CLOUD WORLD / SKYWORLD which was part of The Whitney’s Sunrise/Sunset series.
In 2021 she was a fellow at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence, made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF).
In 2020 she founded Wampum Codes, an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation, while a Mozilla Fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio.
In 2019 she was a delegate at the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion for His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama, at his World Headquarters in Dharmsala, India.
In 2018 she was awarded the 100k Alternative Realities Prize for her Virtual Reality Project: Your Hands Are Feet from Engadget and Verizon Media. This was also the year that nonprofit IDEA New Rochelle won the $1 Million Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge for their VR/AR Citizen toolkit to help the community co-design their city.
In years prior:
Her video art was selected as a part of Storytelling : La biennale d’art contemporain autochtone, 2e édition (Art Biennale of Contemporary Native Art) at Art Mur (Montreal, Canada). She has been a featured artist at numerous international performance art festivals since 2008 in cities not limited to: Beijing, China, Manila, Philippines, Seoul, South Korea, Sao Paulo, Brazil, New York, NY, and Washington, DC. She presented her performance art at the 2012 Gwangju Art Biennial and created an interactive portion of The Exchange Archive at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2013. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and the McCord Museum.
Amelia is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.