Ayana Zaire Cotton is a cultural worker from Prince George’s County, Maryland. During a biotechnology residency at Ginkgo Bioworks she wrote the non-linear speculative fiction novella Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story in collaboration with creative writing software she engineered at the Recurse Center. Ayana is the founder and steward of Seeda School, named after Seeda, the non-binary biotechnologist living in Cykofa, an abolitionist community seeded by black feminist ancestors. Seeda School houses a community of practice for black feminist worldbuilding and creative actualization. Through Seeda School they publish a newsletter and podcast For the Worldbuilders. Inside the ecosystem of their practice Ayana braids storytelling, engineering, and interspecies collaboration to engage our collective imagination around the worlds we need in the future we desire.

Kelani Nichole is a technologist and founder of an experimental media art gallery called TRANSFER. She has been exploring decentralized networks and virtual worlds in contemporary art since 2013. Nichole's focus is supporting artists with critical technology practice, and exploring alternative models of cultural infrastructure. Currently she is building the TRANSFER Archive, a decentralized data trust and cooperative model for cultural value exchange, and producing a generative documentary film 'Almost in Real Time'.

mai is an organizer and writer focused on the digital commons and other intersections between network technologies and the solidarity economy. They are a co-founder and editor of COMPOST, an online magazine about and for the digital commons. They are a Senior Organizer with DWeb and a Digital Commons Fellow with Commons Network.

ngọc (she/her) is a design researcher and community organizer from Southeast Asia whose work addresses and reforms asymmetrical power relations through the lenses of decoloniality and decentralization. For the past 8 years, she has worked at the intersection of community organizing, design research, and public-interest technology — bringing a decolonial lens to how digital systems and communities are built. Outside of work, she can be found on long-distance trails, practicing kendo, or working with clay.

Regina Harsanyi is the Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Museum of the Moving Image. She also advises artist studios, art museums, galleries, auction houses, and private collectors on preventive conservation for variable media arts, from plastics to distributed ledger technologies. Harsanyi previously facilitated over 200 exhibitions with a creative technology focus as Director of Programming at Wallplay after working as a Registrar at Sotheby’s. She is a graduate of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, has taught at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia University, and lectures globally. Her most recent curatorial work includes the acclaimed exhibition Auriea Harvey: My Veins are the Wires, My Body is Your Keyboard (MoMI, 2024).

Sarah Grant is an American media artist and educator based in Berlin. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Art from UC Davis and a Masters of Professional Studies in Media Arts from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Her practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and telecommunication networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. With a focus on radioart and computer networking, she researches and develops artworks as educational tools and workshops that demystify computer networking and radio technology.

Sarah Friend is an artist, researcher, and software developer from Canada and currently based in Berlin, Germany. Her work explores games, economics, and the self via engagement with emerging technology. As an artist, she has exhibited at and worked with MoMA (NYC), SculptureCenter (NYC), HEK (Basel), Haus der Kunst (Munich), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), Someset House (London), and Rhizome (NYC) among others.  She has taught at the graduate and undergraduate level, as well as various para-academic spaces, including HEAD Genevé (Switzerland), Rupert (Lithuania), La Plateforme (France), the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg (Germany), and Gray Area (San Francisco, USA). In 2022, she was a visiting professor at The Cooper Union in New York. 

Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit whose mission is to ensure the permanent preservation of humanity’s most important information by stewarding the development of open-source software and open protocols for decentralized data storage and retrieval networks.