Ari Melenciano is an artist, technologist, researcher, and theorist whose work reveals the synergy between computation, cultural metacognition, and transcendental expression. She is a frequent public speaker and guest lecturer at universities around the world, sharing her research on creative and societally inquisitive uses of emerging technologies. She occasionally designs and teaches courses at New York University, The Pratt Institute’s Design School, Parsons School of Design of The New School, and Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts Program. She is also the founder of Afrotectopia, a cultural institution that is imagining, researching, and building at the nexus of new media art, design, science, and technology through a Black and Afrocentric lens.