Mr. Michael Epstein

Michael is a screenwriter, transmedia director, and expert in place-based storytelling. He has a M.S. degree in Comparative Media Studies from M.I.T. where he specialized in developing multiplatform documentary films. In 2006, Michael founded Walking Cinema. The company has developed cross-platform apps for The Smithsonian, PBS, the Venice Biennale, Audible and many museum and broadcast clients. Epstein is also a former Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts, teaching studio courses in landscape history and interactive media production. In 2019, Michael was selected as a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow at the University of Missouri. Michael has served as a Peer Reviewer and Principal Investigator on several National Endowment for the Humanities programs.

Masaki Fujihata is one of the pioneers of media art. His career began in the 1980s exploring CGI and in the mid-1990s, he produced canonical pieces of so-called ‘interactive art’: Beyond Pages (1995–7) and the Global Interior Project (1995, Ars Electronica GoldenNIKA). After experiments with GPS technology including Field-work@Alsace (2003) his field of artistic creation expanded into social and historical contexts with the AR public art project BeHere Hong Kong (2018), and BeHere / 1942 (2022) in Los Angeles.

Pavel Otdelnov (b. 1979, Dzerzhinsk, USSR) is a London-based artist. He graduated from the Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after Surikov and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Moscow. Since 1996, he has exhibited extensively in Russia, Sweden, the UK, and beyond. He was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize in 2015, 2017, and 2019 (Project of the Year), and became a finalist in 2021. He received a Special Award from the Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Awards in 2017, and in 2020 was named both Artist of the Year by the Innovation Prize and by the Cosmoscow Foundation.

His works are part of museum, corporate, and private collections, including the Uppsala Art Museum, Kalmar Art Museum (Sweden), the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Russia).

Scott Patterson’s broad interests are audio media, interactivity, and access to the global information infrastructure. He has released over 100 recordings of performers ranging from B.B. King to the Tokyo String Quartet to the Seldom Scene to Ella Fitzgerald. Currently, he is developing an archive of recordings of Cantonese Opera from the 1940s and 1950s to use as a training dataset for generative artificial intelligence. He teaches courses in big data and machine learning, sound aesthetics and on-location music recording. His research is published in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, The Journal of Media Education and Human Communication Research and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Telecommunication and Information Agency. He is a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the International Communication Association. In 2025, he was honored as a Fellow of the North American Music Marketing (NAMM) Foundation.

He has served as an Alex Trebek Legacy Fellow at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In 2019, He received an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.