rachel uwa (they/she)
creative director

School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe was founded by Rachel Uwa. Rachel is an artist, educator, and organizer whose background is in audio engineering and vfx compositing. Currently she designs and curates all of the programming of School of Machines.

Over the past 15+ years she’s lived in and organized social justice and tech communities and events big and small. She feels compelled to help bring these two worlds together and make the tech world less daunting and more diverse, inclusive, thoughtful, and fun.

Rachel's biggest desire is to see people living the lives they dream of living rather than the one they feel they ought to. If that dream life is more artistic, creative, socially-engaged, technology-embracing and connects humans to each other and to themselves, well, all the better.

michele walther (she/her)
program advisor

Since 2010, Michele Walther has been an advisor for artists and small businesses in the arts. Trained as a corporate lawyer, she specializes in strategic planning, grant writing, time and project management and negotiating. Venues her artists have exhibited include the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Venice Biennale and Whitechapel Gallery. Her support for artists and small business owners alike serves to help them develop a sustainable and satisfactory living from their creative practice. A graduate of New York University School of Law, she moved to Berlin in 2018 after living the previous 8 years in Paris.

She currently works on program management at the School, overseeing budgets, staffing, policies and applicant intake.

rita eperjesi (she/her)
moment designer

Rita Eperjesi is a Berlin based Hungarian new media artist, creative technologist, the founder of Creative Code Budapest. She won several creative competitions in the advertising industry, currently she is working as a Senior Concept Creative in a digital agency. She has been researching how to teach creative coding in friendly ways, she likes to create warmly welcoming virtual and non-virtual spaces and she also loves clouds.

mario guzman (he/him)
algorithmic advisor and instructor

Mario Guzman is a researcher and new media artist merging visual performance, web development, algorithmic processes, and robotics with writing exploration. He is interested in bringing code studies, storytelling, and culture together by researching human/non-human interaction and reflecting on the experience of narrating through machines and Artificial Intelligence. For him, writing is a performative action that displays as a meaningful event. Inside this scenario, humans and machines create and negotiate meaning as an interactive experience.

kit kuksenok, PhD (they/them)
instructor

Kit Kuksenok, PhD is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and researcher. Their research background is in Human Computer Interaction, and they have explored self-tracking, both through analog and digital media, since first trying out tracking work time in a spreadsheet in 2008. They have taught three previous courses at the School of Ma on the subject of self-tracking and body data. This course draws on a long-term personal practice of self-tracking, in addition to technical knowledge and teaching experience. As an instructor, they care deeply about creating a curious and caring space for reflection - alongside critical technical inquiry and creative expression.

helin ulas (she/her)
visual designer

Helin Ulas is a Berlin-based visual artist and a designer from Turkey(b. 1990). Her artistic practice involves using technology as a medium to create both visual and research-based projects.

She is also one of the founding members of the media arts collective Automaton. They concentrate on creating platforms where they share their experiences and invite others to play and collaborate on various projects, researching on social impacts of technology.

Having focused her research on the spatial representations of Machine Learning, Helin uses light and visual media to create interactive, immersive experiences. Working with generative tools, she focuses on using randomness and manipulating data through visual means.

Helin is teaching Realtime Media as a creative expression tool at HfG Karlsruhe. Her work has been exhibited through various outlets, including D’haus(2022), Lumen Prize(2020), Sonar+D (2019), Ars Electronica(2021-2018), and Wisp Lab(2019).

bianca panozzo (she/her)
wordsmith

Bianca is a creative and very curious human living in Berlin since 2021. She has lived in 8 countries, which led to unexpected and constant change. Her work focuses on words and bodies, and she is drawn to the symbolic meaning, unity and patterns of life. She has studied economics, performance arts, art direction, creative and play writing and worked in tech, education, event management, writing, theater and business development, among others. She writes and openly talks about mental health, very much based on her experience with severe eating disorders.

Her dream is to eventually merge her skills, curiosities and interests, working alongside other humans in ever-evolving and collaborative ways.  She believes in love as a force for social justice.