Fellowships 2021
Adekemi Sijuwade-Ukadike (Teaching Fellow)
Kemi is presently the Project Manager for Fellowship support at Eyebeam. She also was the 2019-2020 digital accessibility fellow at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She holds a MPS from NYU’s ITP program, and a BA in Journalism and Psychology from NYU. Kemi will be mentored by Claire Kearney-Volpe.
Kemi’s project is an open-source, university-level, digital accessibility syllabus that teaches those interested in developing immersive and interactive digital experiences how to critically think about universal and inclusive design, and create accessible content. Access her syllabus and read an interview with Kemi about her project here.
Computational Mama
Computational Mama has been learning, teaching and experimenting with creative computation since 2017. She is a co-instigator of dra.ft and co-founder of Ajaibghar Cultural Services. Her work explores coding as a form of self-care and learning. She is a regular live streamer on Twitch, where she teaches the basics of creative computation. Computational Mama was mentored by Shaharyar Shamshi, who was a Fellow in 2019.
Coding with Friends is an ongoing series of live streams with friends. A casual act of coding together can be equated to making dimsums or folding paper cranes. Coding with Friends casually and simply claims space for womxn creators. The series extends the idea of co-coding as a form of camaraderie, friendship, and self-care. You can read about Computational Mama’s project in detail here.
Angi Chau (Teaching Fellow)
Angi Chau is an educator, maker, engineer, and creative coder. She is constantly thinking about how to design and create learning spaces that celebrate technology, yet allow everyone, especially those who have traditionally been underrepresented in fields like engineering and CS, to feel a sense of belonging. Angi will be mentored by Saber Khan, Processing Foundation’s Education Community Director.
Angi’s project, “Starter Kit for Teaching Creative Coding with p5.js,” asks: How might we empower and support new teachers, who are themselves learning CS, to teach creative coding? I want to investigate the space between pre-made, “plug and play” curricula and a total blank canvas, and create a starter kit of adaptable modules for building one’s own creative coding curriculum. Read an interview with Angi about her project here.
Chia Amisola
Chia Amisola is a Computing and the Arts undergraduate at Yale from Manila. A designer, internet artist, and writer, they work to build radical systems for creator and communities. Chia is the Founder of Developh, a community for mission-driven technologists in the Philippines, who are educating and creating for social impact. Chia will be mentored by Dorothy Santos, Executive Director of Processing Foundation.
Developh p5.js Camp is a creative “camp” for young Filipino technologists to learn about p5.js through biweekly workshops and co-creation sessions to launch artful technology projects that respond to the Philippine present. It is cohort-based and co-creation optimized for low data spaces built atop the Developh (developh.org) community for mission-driven creators.
Cy X
Cy X (they/we) is an energy worker, earth tender, and cyber witch working within the realms of sound, video art, performance, rituals, and care work. Fusing art and technology with the practice of witchcraft, they use spells, rituals, and alchemic practices to fundamentally alter the world around us while merging their ancestral technologies alongside emerging ones. Cy holds a Master’s Degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a Bachelor’s Degree from Colorado College Film and Media Studies Program. Cy was mentored by Johanna Hedva, Director of Advocacy for Processing Foundation.
PORTAL.WEB is a cyber witch coven reimagining our cyber powers through the use of emerging, indigenous, and ancestral technologies. We seek not to establish a hierarchy of technologies but rather work with cyber witch practices in a way that intimately engages our own radical imagination, ancestral knowledge, and inner-knowing.
Through workshops, performances, collaborative rituals, and ceremonies, I invite the collective to not only interrogate what is / is not technology, but also to explore new ways of learning, breaking, and hacking to create tools of our dreams, ones that could open new portals and celebrate Black, brown, queer, and trans folks. Check out PORTAL.WEB here. Read Cy X’s essay about the project here.
Felipe Santos Gomes, Julia Brasil, Katherine Finn Zander, and Marcela Mancino
Felipe Santos Gomes graduated in Architecture and Urbanism, with a postgraduate degree in Film Production, and a Master's in Technology and Society (Brasil). Went to Fab Academy on node Barcelona (Spain) and currently works with digital fabrication and art installations. Has experience with open source softwares and hardwares for visual arts. github.com/araucarialab
Julia Brasil is not sure yet what exactly she is. Currently, she calls herself a visual artist who explores new media. She is also very interested in themes like decoloniality and cosmopolitics. She has a degree in Architecture and is now studying Visual Arts.
Katherine Finn Zander is a musician, music producer, and current computer science student. She is passionate about education, psychology, politics, and the new paths where coding can take music and art.
Marcela Mancino is a Brazilian multimedia performance artist and creative technologist. She studied performing arts, hybrid arts, and interactive telecommunications. Her work spreads across several disciplines, but she is usually involved in designing and building spaces - both physical and digital. github.com/mardefronteira
The group was mentored by Claudio Esperança, who is a Professor at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in the Program of Systems Engineering and Computing and the Graduate Program in Design.
Pê Cinco: Internationalization and Popularization for Portuguese Speakers: This project comes from the desire to make p5.js accessible to the Portuguese-speaking community by translating the p5.js reference. Along with the translation we produced a series of short videos about p5.js, and directly engage with the community in Brazil. The project is documented on Instagram here. You can read an interview with the Fellows about their work here.
Indigemoji
Indigemoji is a collective of artists, linguists, and technologists who first came together in 2018 to create an Arrernte set of emoji reflecting the traditional language of Mparntwe/Tyuretye in Central Australia. They are interested in engaging young people in weaving together some of the oldest languages in the world with some of the newest. They can be found on GitHub here. Indigemoji was mentored by Yining Shi, who served as mentor to 2020 ml5.js Fellow Andreas Refsgaard.
Akeltye-antheme awetyeke—teaching to listen—explores what it would take to teach machines to listen and understand Arrernte, a traditional Indigenous language of Central Australia. By creating a small sovereign dataset of Arrernte spoken words, we created a web-based prototype in p5.js and ml5.js to encourage young people to speak their own language. In doing so we hope to start a conversation with machines, to translate and explore concepts of machine listening and to consider what the implications and potential of that might be. Check out the project here. Read about the project in detail on Medium.
Omar Verduga
My name is Omar Verduga, I’m Mexican, I studied computer science in Mexico and experimental psychology in England. I’m interested in artificial intelligence, interactive art, and decision making. Some of my side projects have repositories on GitHub. Omar was mentored by Esteban Sandoval, a developer and designer focused on UX research and user interface development with an applied ethnographic approach, who currently works for Design Systems International as a design engineer focused on UX research and development.
When the Fellowship began, the p5.js and p5.js web editor websites supported translations for different languages, but the Processing website did not exhibit such functionality. The goal of this Fellowship project was to deliver a Spanish localized version of the Processing Website to further promote its usage among students of Spanish-speaking communities, and to pave the road for new localization efforts in other languages. You can read about Omar’s project in detail here.
Shawn Patrick Higgins (Teaching Fellow)
Shawn Patrick Higgins is a middle school computer science teacher, ScratchEd PDX Coordinator, and Oregon’s resident PBS Digital Innovator. He’s worked with youth in creative technology for over a decade, specializing in project-based curriculum that fuses digital art, animation, audio, social and game-making as a creative pathway to student success! Shawn will be mentored by Saber Khan, the Education Community Director of Processing Foundation.
This project is all about harnessing my students’ all-time favorite Scratch experiences and creating a curated project-based pathway for students to experience the best of the best: first in Scratch, then by “upmixing” them into p5.js by designing explicit creative parallels. You can read an in-depth interview with Shawn Patrick about his project here.
Ted Davis (Teaching Fellow)
Ted Davis is a media artist / designer / educator. Since 2010 he has taught interaction design and coordinated the UIC/HGK MDes Basel program at The Basel School of Design, HGK FHNW. His open source projects (basil.js, XYscope, p5.glitch, P5LIVE) enable programming within Adobe InDesign, rendering graphics on vector displays, byte level glitching and collaborative live coding with p5.js. His GitHub is available here. Ted will be mentored by Saber Khan, the Education Community Director of Processing Foundation.
For two years I’ve been developing P5LIVE, a p5.js coding environment designed for VJ, live coding, remote collaboration, and teaching. The README thoroughly documents all unique features, but can easily be overwhelming and lacks demonstrative examples. Through this Fellowship, walkthroughs for all current and upcoming Classroom features were produced as a video tutorial series. You can read about the project in detail here.