People | Eyebeam

Staff

Eyebeam Center for The Future of Journalism (ECFJ) Fellow

Ruth Gebreyesus is a writer and producer based in the Bay Area.

Gebreyesus’ work centers cultural production and consumption across physical and digital margins. Her writing can be found in Deem Journal, SSENSE, and The Guardian among other places.

Gebreyesus has presented on memes and Black digital production at the Oakland Museum of California and with Rhizome at the New Museum in New York. She’s also a curator of Black Life, a multidisciplinary art and film series at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.

Administrative Assistant

Nat Lemus serves as Eyebeam’s Administrative Assistant, overseeing all administrative functions in the office and calendar management for the Executive Director. The zeal Lemus brings to research, project management, and creative problem solving, as well as a collaborative spirit, makes Lemus the backbone of Eyebeam, adding to the team’s overall ingenuity.

Prior to Eyebeam, Lemus led the charge in supporting day-to-day administration, facility management, and internal company culture experience for companies like Casper, Nike, and Highsnobiety.

Lemus holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Illustration, Printmaking, and Art History from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

Chief Operating Officer

Tyrone Martin serves as Eyebeam’s Chief Operating Officer, working closely with the Executive Director as an integral part of the management team. Martin oversees all Human Resources and facilities and assists in fulfilling development goals through budgetary management. Maintaining a deep understanding of the organization’s needs, Martin devises systems for all infrastructural processes and is committed to developing solutions that, on a daily basis, can make his colleagues’ jobs easier, which in turn can enrich their lives.

Prior to Eyebeam, Martin worked as Operations Manager for a Brooklyn boutique design/build firm.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in History with a minor in English from CUNY Hunter College.

Executive Director

Roderick Schrock is an arts organizer and curator. As a non-profit executive, Schrock leads the functional capacities of Eyebeam’s direct artist support and guides its focus to realign societal relationships with emergent technologies. A key component of Schrock’s goal is to build institutional capacity in order for artists to gain roles as cultural leaders, and with that objective, he conceives and implements programs that elevate their work in society.

Schrock currently teaches in the Curatorial Practice MA Program at the School of Visual Arts and has taught at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), California College of the Arts, and New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He is a member of the Guild of Future Architects, sits on the Netherlands America Foundation Cultural Committee, and is a founding board member of Art+Feminism.

Schrock makes Brooklyn home where he lives with his partner, the writer Joon Oluchi Lee.

Board

Salome Asega

Salome Asega is an artist, researcher, and educator working between participatory design and emerging technology. Salome believes in leveraging the power of collective imagination to redistribute power, change culture, and shift policy. Before joining the NEW INC team in 2021, she worked at the Ford Foundation as a Technology Fellow supporting artists and organizations in the new media arts ecosystem. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships with Eyebeam, The Laundromat Project, and Recess and has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale, MoMA, Carnegie Library, August Wilson Center, Knockdown Center, and more. Since 2015, Salome has been teaching studio and design methodology courses in the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design.

Emma Canarick Co-Chair

Emma Canarick oversees all Operations and Philanthropy for the Johnson Family Office. In that role, she oversees all personnel, operating protocols, and personal philanthropy. In addition, she is the Director of Capacity Building for the Pacific Fund, a discrete fund housed within the Atlantic Foundation, which represents all institutional grant-making. Finally, Ms. Canarick directs all philanthropy and community engagement strategies on behalf of the Johnson businesses and investments in Guanacaste, Costa Rica including boutique hospitality, food and beverage, sustainable development of properties and strategic land preservation.

Kenyatta Cheese Co-Chair

Kenyatta Cheese is a professional Internet enthusiast who creates technology-based media studies on the impact of media and technology on culture. He is Cofounder of Everybody at Once, a media consultancy, Cocreator of Know Your Meme, a primary resource for understanding web culture, and Founder of Unmediated.org, a blog that tracks trends in decentralized media.

He is also one of the pioneers of web-based television, with projects such as WiFiTV, Browse TV, and vogbrowser. In previous iterations he has been an Eyebeam resident and worked with the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, and the online video network Rocketboom.

R. Luke DuBois

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his projects reveal the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. DuBois’ work and writing has appeared in print and online in the New York Times, National Geographic, and Esquire Magazine, and he was an invited speaker at the 2016 TED Conference. An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data developed by San Francisco-based software company Cycling’74. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums. He currently performs as part of Bioluminescence. He is the director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and is on the Board of Directors of the ISSUE Project Room. His artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.

Ruby Lerner

Ruby Lerner is an American arts executive. She is the founder and former Executive Director of Creative Capital, an arts foundation, from 1999 to 2016. In 2017, Lerner was the inaugural Herberger Institute Policy Fellow at Arizona State University and Senior Fellow to the Patty Disney Center for Life and Work at CalArts. She was appointed to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts board in 2016 and serves on many advisory boards, including New Inc, The Ackland Museum and Arts Everywhere, both at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Kenan Institute advisory board for UNC-School of the Arts in Winston Salem, among many others. Currently, she serves as a consultant to the Arts Initiative at the Open Society Foundation, working on the Foundation’s International Soros Arts Fellowship.

Robert Ransick

Robert Ransick is an artist, designer and educator. He draws inspiration from the social and political world we live in, history, and the potential for a future that is better. After the economic collapse of 2008 and Occupy Wall Street, he enrolled as an MBA in Sustainability student to research the systems that fueled the catastrophic events. His interest in social justice, public engagement, local economies, and the generative power of creativity to affect change made this a natural place for him to acquire new knowledge and skills.

His creative work has been exhibited in both national and international venues including Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, Exit Art, Storefront for Art and Architecture, The New Museum, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, Italy, and in far-flung places such as the border of the United States and Mexico, old school classrooms and public plazas. He has received funding from Franklin Furnace, the Mellon Foundation, the Boomerang Fund for Artists and the National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network. He has been an artist in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology and LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). He has collaborated with Creative Time, the Center for Artistic Activism, the Aperture Foundation, and Blind Spot.

Alongside his work as an artist, he has held leadership positions in academic and private settings including as director of both the computing and photography departments at The New School for Social Research in New York, founding director of the MFA in Public Action and director of Art and Entrepreneurship programs at Bennington College’s Elizabeth Coleman Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA), where he was also a full-time faculty member teaching courses in digital arts, social and civic engaged practices in the arts, and creative enterprise and organization building.

He is currently the Vice President of Academic Affairs at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

As a young artist, Ransick worked with the artist Lorraine O’Grady producing the suite of photomontages that make up Body is the Ground of My Experience. Their friendship is ongoing and he continues to support O’Grady and her work in various capacities. While an employee of PPOW Gallery in the early 1990’s, he assisted David Wojnarowicz in the creation of his final works before he succumbed to AIDS. Working with these two extraordinary and seminal artists, strongly influenced and shaped him as a person and an artist.

He holds a BFA in Photography, with honors, from the School of Visual Arts, an MA in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research and an MBA in Sustainability from Bard College.

He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Eyebeam in New York City and Springboard for the Arts in the Twin Cities.

Ellen Sandor Secretary

Ellen Sandor is a new media artist and Founding Director of (art)n. Sandor’s PHSCologram sculptures and installations with (art)n have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, International Center of Photography, Victoria & Albert Museum, and others. As a Visiting Scholar of Culture and Society, NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she co-edited and contributed to New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts. Sandor is an Advisory Board Chair, Gene Siskel Film Center, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She serves on the Board of Governors, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Life Trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also co-founder of the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection. In 2012, she received the Thomas R. Leavens Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts through Lawyers for the Creative Arts, and in 2013, the Gene Siskel Film Center Outstanding Leadership Award. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, and Fermilab’s Artist in Residence in 2016. She was also honored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2017 for her longstanding commitment to integrating art and science. Please visit: visualizinginanewlight.com

Advisory

Kaizar Campwala

Kaizar Campwala, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Al Jazeera Digital, has helped launch and build several digital media ventures. Prior to launching Jetty, a new audio brand for Al Jazeera, he co-founded CALmatters, a statehouse reporting organization in Sacramento, and led the business development and partnerships teams at Stitcher, the leading independent mobile podcast app. Kaizar is currently a board member at the San Francisco Public Press, and a mentor at the media accelerator Matter. He has an A.B. from Brown University, and an MBA from UCLA.

Matt Corwine

Matt is a writer, technologist and communications leader, with roots in the technology, art and electronic music communities in the Pacific Northwest. He currently works in communications at Microsoft Research.

Bill Foulkes

Bill Foulkes is a strategic planning and marketing consultant, entrepreneur and currently a faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design. The course he created, Design and Entrepreneurial Thinking, introduces artists and designers to business concepts and enhances their abilities to bring their ideas to reality.

This curriculum originated during Bill’s tenure as the Executive Director of the Center for Design and Business at RISD (2006-2008). The Center helped business, educational institutions and government entities set up and manage collaborative design research projects with RISD students, faculty and alumni.

Bill has over twenty years of experience in strategic planning, people development, marketing and finance in both high-tech and consumer companies where he has successfully identified, communicated and implemented new business concepts and initiatives, led organizational change, built strategic partner relationships and led creative processes.

Bill has been on the executive team of several small start-ups, including MTI Group Holdings and Context Media. Prior to joining these firms, he was a strategy consultant at Telesis, a division of Towers Perrin. Bill’s experience also includes consumer product marketing at Gillette and investment banking at Morgan Stanley.

Bill holds an A.B. in History from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Susan Gladstone

Jordan Harris

Jordan Harris is an experienced operating executive and entrepreneur. He is the COO of Glitch, the friendly community where millions of creators collaborate on making and discovering apps, bots, art, and anything else they can imagine. Harris is an advisor to startups and enterprise companies and a life coach at the Inspirica Women and Family Shelter. As a founder and operating executive, Harris has been recognized by many industry leading publications, such as Bloomberg, Wired, Fortune, Ad Age and Fast Companies’ list of Innovators. Harris is a graduate of The George Washington University and attended The Leadership and Change Management Program at the Harvard Business School.

Powell MacDougall

Powell MacDougall founded p|m Gallery in 2004 to support bringing work by emerging and mid-career artists to the international arena through solid programming, exhibition exchanges, an annual curatorial residency programme and participation in international art fairs. In its first year, the gallery was invited to participate in New Territories at ARCO Madrid – a curated selection of galleries from Canada organized by David Liss, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Prior to establishing p|m Gallery, Powell gained extensive experience in museums and the commercial art world, where she honed her ability to develop Canadian artists within the international scene, and vice versa.

Ramsey Nasser

Ramsey Nasser is a computer scientist, game designer, and educator based in Brooklyn. He researches programming languages by building tools that make computation more expressive and projects that question the basic assumptions we make about code itself. His games playfully push people out of their comfort zones, and are often built using experimental tools of his design. Ramsey is a former Eyebeam fellow and a professor at schools around New York.

Kathleen O’Grady

Kathleen O’Grady is a civic volunteer, philanthropist and art collector.
A long serving board member at Playwrights Horizons, Kathleen served as the Chair of the Board for the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. At the Aldrich Museum, she chaired the capital campaign for the museum expansion and renovation. She is also a member of the Drawing Committee at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

From 1999 to 2001, she and her late husband, Tom O’Grady, served as Co-Chairs of the St. Martin’s University library campaign. Ms. O’Grady is also a member of the Board of Trustees.

Kamal Sinclair

Kamal Sinclair, is making the world more beautiful as the Executive Director of the Guild of Future Architects, supporting independent artists as a Senior Consultant for Sundance Institute’s Future of Culture Initiative, and makes art through a family creative practice at Sinclair Futures. Previously, she served as the Director of Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Program, which supports artists working at the convergence of film, art, media and technology; and as an artist and producer on Question Bridge: Black Males.

Ching Sung

With a background in data analysis, product development, and providing marketing guidance to nonprofits, Ching is passionate about leveraging her expertise to help non-profit initiatives optimize impact through data and scale impact using tech. Ching is currently employed as a Product Manager in a AI/ML Audio Research Lab at Spotify to create research-driven products. Outside of her day job, Ching enjoys being a dog-mom to her jindo/shiba pup and practicing the art of Ikebana flower design.

David Zicarelli

Zicarelli’s primary work has been in the development of the Max visual programming environment used by musicians, artists, and inventors. In the late 1990s he founded Cycling ’74 to support the development and distribution of Max. The company now employs around 30 people in seven different countries, all of whom work remotely. For Zicarelli and his co-workers, Cycling ’74 is both a software company and a vehicle for exploring the interrelated challenges of distributed work, individual development, and cultural impact. Zicarelli has developed software at IRCAM, Gibson Guitar, and AT&T and has been a visiting faculty member at Bennington College and Northwestern University. BA, Bennington College; PhD, Stanford University. He returned to Bennington as a visiting faculty member for Fall 2019.