about us
SCHOOL OF MACHINES, MAKING & MAKE-BELIEVE
School of Machines, Making & Make Believe provides one-of-a-kind hands-on learning experiences in the areas of art, technology, design, and human connection.
Our philosophy is centered around the idea that we are all lifelong learners. We would love for our students to leave our programs activated; not only equipped with technical and hands-on tools and skill sets, but also critically-minded, more deeply engaged with their surroundings and with themselves.
Artists, designers, technologists, makers, researchers and the like come to us to explore new topics, develop and expand their practice, and wrestle out the courage to begin something new. We support them in these endeavors while encouraging curiosity, confidence, and the enthusiasm to say something with their work.
Our instructors are distinguished artists and technologists working directly with the tools they teach and our programs provide an opportunity for our students to work with them to expand their fields of knowledge and build towards a more interdisciplinary practice. Program sizes are small and students actively engage their new-found skills and collaborators each step of the way, creating individual and group work towards a public exhibition at programs end.
We encourage people without previous experience to apply, as we believe the formative qualities that make each of us distinctive humans-- our beliefs, attitudes and unique experiences-- can guide us towards the creation of something more magical than what technology alone can achieve. We must all start somewhere!
Have a look at our current programs here and testimonials from our former students here.
Please note that each program is a unique moment in time. As we explore new themes and tackle new questions, topics, instructors, duration and even the country in which programs are held each year will change. We’re striving to keep it interesting. Stay tuned!
If you would like to support our work, please make a donation.
Our goal is to provide learning opportunities to as many people as possible so we keep fees to a minimum while keeping classes small and intimate. We offer a number of heavily discounted solidarity tickets for women and persons from BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ and other under-represented communities for our online courses, and have awarded full scholarships to our in-person programs.
Donations support us in our goal of making access to technology more democratic and diverse! Thanks so much for supporting our work.
School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe is a uniquely curated School born in Berlin, Germany in 2014, keen on inventing one-of-a-kind hands-on learning experiences in the areas of art, technology, design, and human connection.
We embrace art, creativity and exploring the latest technology and ourselves with openness, humility, and curiosity.
We follow the Berlin Code of Conduct.
school of machines
making & make-believe
Veteranenstraße 21
10119 Berlin, Germany
+49 1517 5374602
info@schoolofma.org
meet the team
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. 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.
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.