“I use new kinds of technology to tell new kinds of stories.

I’m interested in science storytelling for environmental futures and how homelessness intersects with climate justice. Climate change could force up to 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050.

I make art to expand our sense of what is possible and to help us prepare for futures we deserve.

I stand with those who defy categorization. We are prototyping just futures in worlds still waiting to be made, because justice demands new terrain. For the people who choose hope daily and build futures worthy of it.”

— Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Artist Statement, 2025

About

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a Brooklyn-based artist, technologist, and educator, and an enrolled member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma. She has been building with AI since 2011, exploring how stories and technical systems shape what people can understand, imagine, and do together.

Her work takes many forms: moving-image installations, software, immersive experiences, books, workshops, and whiteboard conversations. Across these forms, she asks how we might make complicated systems more understandable and give people a meaningful role in shaping them. A film can open a question that a data model cannot. A prototype can make an idea tangible enough for people to challenge and change it.

This approach has carried her between creative practice and the places where technology becomes part of everyday life. At Contentful, she worked across developer relations and technical education, helping developers, customers, partners, and executives understand how interconnected technologies could serve their needs. As founding director of DBRS Innovation Labs and executive director of IDEA New Rochelle, she led teams exploring machine learning and tools that let communities help design their city.

Today, Amelia is an associate professor of film and media studies at Hunter College, where she leads a co-creation cohort and develops programs connecting creative technology, the humanities, and responsible AI. Through her fellowship with New America’s Future of Land and Housing program, she advises state and city teams on AI and data practices for eviction prevention. Her current research includes GoodForWhat.org, which explores how AI might support housing services while preserving human judgment and care.

Her creative and technical work draws on Indigenous traditions of relation, responsibility, and collective knowledge. She created Wampum.Codes, an ethical framework for software development, and co-authored Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice, published by MIT Press. Her background includes fellowships at Stanford HAI and Mozilla, board service at the Processing Foundation, and graduate study at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Whether she is making art, advising a team, or teaching, Amelia is interested in what becomes possible when people can see how a system works and help decide what it should become.

Selected projects and recognition

In 2025–2026, Amelia is the Housing and AI Fellow with New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. She received an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant for Stabilizing Futures: Mapping Housing Loss with AI, in collaboration with Bright Community Trust and New America.

She created the virtual reality experience for Fancy Dance, directed by fellow Seneca-Cayuga filmmaker Erica Tremblay. The film stars Lily Gladstone and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Filmed on Amelia and Erica’s reservation in Grove, Oklahoma, it brings the Cayuga language to feature-film audiences and is available through Apple TV.

Her experimental film I WOULD LIKE TO BE MIDNIGHT / I WOULD LIKE TO BE SKY has screened at imagineNATIVE, deadCenter, and Māoriland. It has also been presented by the Columbus Museum of Art and the NVIDIA GTC Art Gallery.

In 2022, she participated in the Sundance Art of Practice Fellowship, supported by the MacArthur Foundation. Her CLOUD WORLD / SKYWORLD project was featured in the Whitney Museum’s Sunrise/Sunset series.

During the 2021–2022 academic year, she was a research fellow at Stanford HAI and an artist and technologist in residence at Stanford University, supported by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning.

In 2020, while a Mozilla Fellow at MIT’s Co-Creation Studio, she founded Wampum.Codes, an award-winning podcast and ethical framework for software development grounded in Indigenous values of co-creation.

In 2019, she was a delegate at the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India.

In 2018, her virtual reality project Your Hands Are Feet received the $100,000 Alternative Realities Prize from Engadget and Verizon Media. That year, IDEA New Rochelle also won the $1 million Bloomberg Mayors Challenge for its VR/AR toolkit supporting community participation in city design.

Amelia has presented performance work internationally since 2008, including in Beijing, Manila, Seoul, São Paulo, New York, and Washington, DC. She presented at the 2012 Gwangju Biennale and created an interactive component of The Exchange Archive at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Kadist, and the McCord Museum.