Verge: Speakers

Ralph Appelbaum

Ralph has had extensive involvement in every facet of museum planning and exhibition design. His renowned work for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Newseum has won every major design award, and he is a frequent lecturer at local, national and international conferences on a wide variety of issues related to museum design. Appelbaum's 80-person practice, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, serves a national and international clientele of major museums and cultural institutions. (www.raany.com).

Scott Ault

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Scott is vice president of creative development for BRC Imagination Arts, a world-renowned producer of experiences for museums, visitor centers and theme parks around the globe. In this role, he oversees the creative aspects of almost every BRC project. This summer, Ault will be moving to Amsterdam to head up BRC's European headquarters. (www.brcweb.com)

Debbie Bonnanzio

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Debbie provides creative direction and brand compliance for World Wrestling Federation Entertainment and the XFL-the newly launched professional football league. She has more than 15 years experience designing print, consumer products and promotional materials for sports and entertainment genres, including wrestling, boxing, bodybuilding, racing, football and music. Bonnanzio has been instrumental in the development of the phenomenon now known as "WWF Attitude," and in bringing wrestling into mainstream entertainment with the number-one show on cable television. She additionally oversaw the aggressive three-month team logo identity launch for the XFL. (www.wwf.com)

Brenda Laurel

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Brenda is a designer, performer, researcher and writer whose work focuses on experience design and cultural aspects of technology. Her career in interactive media spans 25 years and such companies as Atari, Activision, Apple and Lucasfilm. Laurel was one of the founding members of Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, California, where she researched gender and technology. Her work at Interval led to the founding of Purple Moon, a software company that made products for girls and was acquired by Mattel in 1999. Laurel is currently a member of the graduate faculty in media design at the Art Center College of Design. She edited The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990) and wrote Computers as Theatre (1991) and the forthcoming Utopian Entrepreneur (fall 2001).

Dale Mason

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Dale is director of attraction development at Universal Studios Recreation Group, where he has designed "Tin Can Alley" for the American Tail Playground and the "Wild West Stunt Show." He was the conceptual designer for Wakaima Marina City’s “Seafari” ride in Japan's Porta Europa, and the creative director and senior conceptual designer on Universal's theme park, "Islands of Adventure," as well as Steven Spielberg's Dive Restaurant in Los Angeles. A trained set and stage designer, Mason has also worked as a roadie for the punk polka band, Polkacide. He is currently working on various future attractions for Universal and teaches advanced entertainment design at the Art Center College of Design. (www.unistudios.com)

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky

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Dj Spooky is a conceptual artist, writer and musician working in New York City. A writer for numerous publications, Miller is copublisher of the magazine A Gathering of the Tribes and was the first editor-at-large of Artbyte. His artwork has appeared in the Whitney Biennial and other important venues. Miller is best known by his "constructed persona" Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid, and has performed and collaborated internationally with a wide variety of pre-eminent musicians and composers. His own records include Riddim Warfare (Geffen), Songs of a Dead Dreamer, The Viral Sonata, Synthetic Fury (Asphodel) and Necropolis (Knitting Factory). Miller's novel, Flow My Blood the DJ Said, is forthcoming. (www.djspooky.com)

Ryan Oakes

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Ryan Oakes is one of the most accomplished young magicians performing in America today. He has performed all over the U.S., including in Las Vegas, Hollywood and The White House, and has appeared on the Disney Channel and CNN. Though most of Oakes’ work takes the form of live performances and magic consulting, some of his recent projects include creating of a magic mini-site for Disney Online and cowriting a magic-themed variety show titled "The Human Zoo," which he acted in and helped to produce in Philadelphia last April. (www.thefovea.com)

Rodney Smith

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Rodney is a New York-based photographer whose corporate, fashion and editorial clients include American Express, BMW, Starbucks, Bergdorf Goodman, Ralph Lauren, the New York Times Magazine and W Magazine. Smith graduated from the University of Virginia in 1970 and earned a master of Divinity in Theology from Yale University in 1973. While at Yale, he also studied photography under Walker Evans. In 1975, Smith received a Jerusalem Foundation Fellowship that enabled him to live in Jerusalem for three months. This work resulted in his first book, In the Land of Light, published in 1983. His second work, entitled The Hat Book, was published in 1993. Smith is currently working on his third book.

Lisa Strausfeld

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Lisa is the founder of InformationArt, a New York–based company founded in late 2000 that creates digital information art products for public and private environments. Originally trained as an architect at Harvard, Strausfeld started work in 1993 at the MIT Media Lab that focused on designing and building immersive information experiences. In 1996, she cofounded Perspecta, an information architecture software company in San Francisco that was acquired last year by Excite@Home. In 1999 she joined Quokka Sports as vice president of Quokka Labs, a small research group focused on defining immersive sports experiences for future technology platforms. (www.informationart.com)

Gong Szeto

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Gong is senior vice president and chief creative officer of Rare Medium, Inc., a global Internet services company. He leads the User Experience Group in Rare's 11 offices worldwide and oversees the disciplines of user-experience strategy, user experience design, user experience research, and manages the Rare wireless and broadband practices. Szeto has been a design professional for 10 years, having been formally trained in architecture, urban planning and computer science. Currently he is focusing on designing organizational structures that support innovation best-practices across the many disciplines that are required to solve challenging problems in today's business systems. (www.raremedium.com)

Vernor Vinge

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Vernor is a respected writer in the field of human and machine intelligence. His science fiction works have received much critical acclaim, including Hugo Awards for his two most recent novels, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. He is emeritus professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at San Diego State University.

For more information, call 212 807 1990 or e-mail molly_beverstein@aiga.org .