Staff & Board
Staff
Tyrone Martin
,
Chief Operating Officer
tyrone.martin@eyebeam.org
Tyrone Martin serves as Eyebeam’s Manager of Operations, working closely with the Executive Director as an integral part of the management team. Tyrone oversees all Human Resources and facilities, and assists in the fulfillment of development goals through budgetary management. Maintaining a deep understanding of the organization’s needs, he devises systems for all infrastructural processes. Tyrone is committed to developing solutions that can make his colleagues’ jobs easier on a daily basis, which in turn can bring enrichment to their lives.
Prior to Eyebeam, Tyrone also worked as Manager of Operations for a design/build firm in Bushwick. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in History with a minor in English from CUNY Hunter College.
Kemi Sijuwade-Ukadike
,
Manager of Programs and Inclusion
kemi.sijuwade-ukadike@eyebeam.org
Kemi is interested in creating tools and content for marginalized communities. Her work centers around creative technology management, digital accessibility, as well as propagating African makers and their work. She is currently working on two websites: an African news website, as well as further developing Africa Maker. Kemi comes to Eyebeam from working at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where she was the Digital Accessibility Fellow (2020). She holds a Master of Professional Studies (MPS) from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU, as well as a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Journalism and Psychology from NYU.
Nat Lemus
,
Administrative Assistant
nat.lemus@eyebeam.org
Nat Lemus serves as Eyebeam’s Administrative Assistant, overseeing all administrative functions in the office and calendar management for the Executive Director. The zeal they bring to research, project management, creative problem solving, as well as their collaborative spirit makes them the backbone of Eyebeam, adding to the team’s overall ingenuity.
Prior to Eyebeam, Nat led the charge in supporting day-to-day administration, facility management, and internal company culture experience for companies like Casper, Nike, and Highsnobiety.
Nat holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Illustration and Art History from Maryland Institute College of Art.
Roderick Schrock
,
Executive Director
roddy@eyebeam.org
Roderick Schrock is an arts organizer and curator. As a non-profit executive, he leads the functional capacities of Eyebeam’s direct artist support and guides its focus to realign societal relationships with emergent technologies. He builds institutional capacity in order for artists to gain roles as cultural leaders and conceives and implements programs that elevate their work in society.
He currently teaches in the Curatorial Practice MA Program at the School of Visual Arts and has taught at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), California College of the Arts, and New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He is a member of the Guild of Future Architects, sits on the Netherlands America Foundation Cultural Committee, and is a founding board member of Art+Feminism.
Schrock makes Brooklyn home where he lives with his partner, the writer Joon Oluchi Lee.
Brent Bailey , Tech Fellow
Brent Bailey is Eyebeam’s Tech Fellow, assisting with Eyebeam’s digital programs and new digital-first space. He is a creative technologist and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work is focused on building pathways to joy and liberation through computational modeling and games. He has taught at Hunter College, worked with organizations like MIT and code.org, and spoken and presented his work across the country.
Brent holds a BA in Philosophy from Reed College in Portland, OR, and an MPS in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. He is a proud native of Charleston, West Virginia.
Board
Joe Versace , Chair
Mr. Versace is a principal and senior advisor in the New York office of AB Bernstein, where he oversees a global investment management advisory practice. A graduate of Boston University, Mr. Versace currently serves as Chairman of the Board for Eyebeam, a not-for-profit collaborative arts, and technology studio; Chairman of the Board of Trustees for Westbeth Artists Housing, a nonprofit housing and commercial complex in New York City; and the Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees for The SACI College of Arts & Design in Florence, Italy.
His deep civic involvement includes many arts, business, youth, and social service organizations where he has served or is serving as a board member and volunteer including ABNY, The Alliance for the Arts, The Association to Benefit Children, The American Council for Cultural Policy, Children for Children, Exploring the Arts, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Jazz at Lincoln Center, MOUSE, New York City Department of Education, TED Arts Fellows, One Laptop per Child, Pencil and The Partnership for New York City.
Emma Canarick , Vice-Chair
Emma Canarick oversees all Operations and Philanthropy for the Johnson Family Office. In that role, she oversees all personnel, operating protocols, and personal philanthropy. In addition, she is the Director of Capacity Building for the Pacific Fund, a discrete fund housed within the Atlantic Foundation, which represents all institutional grant-making. Finally, Ms. Canarick directs all philanthropy and community engagement strategies on behalf of the Johnson businesses and investments in Guanacaste, Costa Rica including boutique hospitality, food and beverage, sustainable development of properties and strategic land preservation.
Rufaro Makanda , Treasurer
Rufaro is an Investment Banking Vice President in Bank of America’s Financial Sponsors Group. In this role, she works with private equity clients on acquisition financings, M&A, IPOs, refinancings, and dividend recapitalizations across a broad spectrum of industries and products including leveraged finance and equity. Prior to Bank of America, she worked as a senior private client associate at AllianceBernstein, serving high net worth individuals.
Rufaro serves on the Steering Committee of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. Previous board and junior board commitments include United States Tennis Association Eastern Metro Region, Dartmouth Club of New York, FC Harlem, and Indego Africa.
Ellen Sandor , Secretary
Ellen Sandor is a new media artist and Founding Director of (art)n. Sandor’s PHSCologram sculptures and installations with (art)n have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, International Center of Photography, Victoria & Albert Museum, and others. As a Visiting Scholar of Culture and Society, NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she co-edited and contributed to New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts. Sandor is an Advisory Board Chair, Gene Siskel Film Center, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She serves on the Board of Governors, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Life Trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also co-founder of the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection. In 2012, she received the Thomas R. Leavens Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts through Lawyers for the Creative Arts, and in 2013, the Gene Siskel Film Center Outstanding Leadership Award. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, and Fermilab's Artist in Residence in 2016. She was also honored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2017 for her longstanding commitment to integrating art and science. Please visit: visualizinginanewlight.com
Ruby Lerner , Member
Ruby Lerner is an American arts executive. She is the founder and former Executive Director of Creative Capital, an arts foundation, from 1999 to 2016. In 2017, Lerner was the inaugural Herberger Institute Policy Fellow at Arizona State University and Senior Fellow to the Patty Disney Center for Life and Work at CalArts. She was appointed to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts board in 2016 and serves on many advisory boards, including New Inc, The Ackland Museum and Arts Everywhere, both at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Kenan Institute advisory board for UNC-School of the Arts in Winston Salem, among many others. Currently, she serves as a consultant to the Arts Initiative at the Open Society Foundation, working on the Foundation's International Soros Arts Fellowship.
R. Luke DuBois , Member
R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance.
He is the director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and is on the Board of Directors of the ISSUE Project Room. His artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.
Kenyatta Cheese , Member
Kenyatta Cheese is a professional Internet enthusiast who creates technology-based media studies on the impact of media and technology on culture. He is Cofounder of Everybody at Once, a media consultancy, Cocreator of Know Your Meme, a primary resource for understanding web culture, and Founder of Unmediated.org, a blog that tracks trends in decentralized media.
He is also one of the pioneers of web-based television, with projects such as WiFiTV, Browse TV, and vogbrowser. In previous iterations he has been an Eyebeam resident and worked with the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, and the online video network Rocketboom.
Salome Asega , Member
Salome Asega is an artist and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships with Eyebeam, New Museum, The Laundromat Project, and Recess. She has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale, MoMA, Carnegie Library, August Wilson Center, Knockdown Center, and more. She has also given presentations and lectures at Performa, EYEO, Brooklyn Museum, MIT Media Lab, NYU, and more. Salome was the inaugural Ford Foundation Technology Fellow landscaping new media artist and organization networks. She is also the Director of Partnerships at POWRPLNT, a youth digital art collaboratory in Brooklyn. Salome received her MFA from Parsons at The New School in Design and Technology where she now teaches.
Jed Alpert , Chair Emeritus
Jed Alpert is CEO and co-founder of Mobile Commons, the leading provider of mobile technology for civic engagement. Prior to Mobile Commons, Jed worked as an entertainment and media attorney on such films as Slingblade and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He has also produced numerous feature films, including Sunday, winner of the 1997 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.
Advisory Committee
Robert Ransick, Advisory Committee Chair
Robert Ransick is an artist, designer and educator having shown work at Eyebeam, Exit Art, Storefront for Art and Architecture, The New Museum, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, Italy, and in far-flung places such as the border of the United States and Mexico, old school classrooms and public plazas. He has received funding from Franklin Furnace, the Mellon Foundation, the Boomerang Fund for Artists and the National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network. He has collaborated with Creative Time, the Center for Artistic Activism, the Aperture Foundation, and Blind Spot. Alongside his work as an artist, he has held the position of director at both the computing and photography departments at The New School for Social Research in New York.
He is currently the Vice President of Academic Affairs at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He holds a BFA in Photography, with honors, from the School of Visual Arts, an MA in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research and an MBA in Sustainability from Bard College.
Kathleen O’Grady
Kathleen O’Grady is a civic volunteer, philanthropist and art collector.
A long serving board member at Playwrights Horizons, Kathleen served as the Chair of the Board for the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. At the Aldrich Museum, she chaired the capital campaign for the museum expansion and renovation. She is also a member of the Drawing Committee at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
From 1999 to 2001, she and her late husband, Tom O’Grady, served as Co-Chairs of the St. Martin’s University library campaign. Ms. O’Grady is also a member of the Board of Trustees.
David Zicarelli
Zicarelli’s primary work has been in the development of the Max visual programming environment used by musicians, artists, and inventors. In the late 1990s he founded Cycling ’74 to support the development and distribution of Max. The company now employs around 30 people in seven different countries, all of whom work remotely. For Zicarelli and his co-workers, Cycling ’74 is both a software company and a vehicle for exploring the interrelated challenges of distributed work, individual development, and cultural impact. Zicarelli has developed software at IRCAM, Gibson Guitar, and AT&T and has been a visiting faculty member at Bennington College and Northwestern University. BA, Bennington College; PhD, Stanford University. He returned to Bennington as a visiting faculty member for Fall 2019.
Kaizar Campwala
Kaizar Campwala, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Al Jazeera Digital, has helped launch and build several digital media ventures. Prior to launching Jetty, a new audio brand for Al Jazeera, he co-founded CALmatters, a statehouse reporting organization in Sacramento, and led the business development and partnerships teams at Stitcher, the leading independent mobile podcast app. Kaizar is currently a board member at the San Francisco Public Press, and a mentor at the media accelerator Matter. He has an A.B. from Brown University, and an MBA from UCLA.
Ching Sung
With a background in data analysis, product development, and providing marketing guidance to nonprofits, Ching is passionate about leveraging her expertise to help non-profit initiatives optimize impact through data and scale impact using tech. Ching is currently employed as a Product Manager in a AI/ML Audio Research Lab at Spotify to create research-driven products. Outside of her day job, Ching enjoys being a dog-mom to her jindo/shiba pup and practicing the art of Ikebana flower design.
Jordan Harris
Jordan Harris is an experienced operating executive and entrepreneur. He previously was the COO of Glitch, the friendly community where millions of creators collaborate on making and discovering apps, bots, art, and anything else they can imagine. Harris is an advisor to startups and enterprise companies and a life coach at the Inspirica Women and Family Shelter. As a founder and operating executive, Harris has been recognized by many industry-leading publications, such as Bloomberg, Wired, Fortune, Ad Age, and Fast Companies’ list of Innovators. Harris is a graduate of The George Washington University and attended The Leadership and Change Management Program at the Harvard Business School.
Powell MacDougall
Powell MacDougall founded p|m Gallery in 2004 to support bringing work by emerging and mid-career artists to the international arena through solid programming, exhibition exchanges, an annual curatorial residency programme and participation in international art fairs. In its first year, the gallery was invited to participate in New Territories at ARCO Madrid – a curated selection of galleries from Canada organized by David Liss, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Prior to establishing p|m Gallery, Powell gained extensive experience in museums and the commercial art world, where she honed her ability to develop Canadian artists within the international scene, and vice versa.
Bill Foulkes
Bill Foulkes is a strategic planning and marketing consultant, entrepreneur and currently a faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design. The course he created, Design and Entrepreneurial Thinking, introduces artists and designers to business concepts and enhances their abilities to bring their ideas to reality.
This curriculum originated during Bill’s tenure as the Executive Director of the Center for Design and Business at RISD (2006-2008). The Center helped business, educational institutions and government entities set up and manage collaborative design research projects with RISD students, faculty and alumni.
Bill has over twenty years of experience in strategic planning, people development, marketing and finance in both high-tech and consumer companies where he has successfully identified, communicated and implemented new business concepts and initiatives, led organizational change, built strategic partner relationships and led creative processes.
Bill has been on the executive team of several small start-ups, including MTI Group Holdings and Context Media. Prior to joining these firms, he was a strategy consultant at Telesis, a division of Towers Perrin. Bill’s experience also includes consumer product marketing at Gillette and investment banking at Morgan Stanley.
Bill holds an A.B. in History from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Kamal Sinclair
Kamal Sinclair, is making the world more beautiful as the Executive Director of the Guild of Future Architects, supporting independent artists as a Senior Consultant for Sundance Institute’s Future of Culture Initiative, and makes art through a family creative practice at Sinclair Futures. Previously, she served as the Director of Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Program, which supports artists working at the convergence of film, art, media and technology; and as an artist and producer on Question Bridge: Black Males.
Laura Raicovich
Laura Raicovich is dedicated to art and artistic production that relies on complexity, poetics, and care to create a more engaged and equitable civic realm. Her latest book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (Verso 2021) addresses the ways in which museums and cultural institutions can become better spaces for more people. She most recently served as interim director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art , a museum devoted to queer art and artists and is the recipient of both the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators at Hyperallergic. She is currently working on an in-depth research, exhibition, collecting, and book project titled The 31 Women which centers on the 1943 exhibition by the same name, organized by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of this Century gallery.
Until early 2018, she served as President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum where she oversaw an inviting and vital commons for art, ideas, and engagement. That same year, she co-curated Mel Chin: All Over the Place (with Manon Slome and No Longer Empty), the first major presentation in New York City of artist Mel Chin in more than 20 years, which occupied the entire Queens Museum and multiple public sites in the city.
Raicovich lectures internationally and has organized numerous talks and programs, including the two collaborations on series of public seminars with Carin Kuoni at The New School’s Vera List Center for Arts and Politics: the 2018-19 Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness , conceived in collaboration with artist Amar Kanwar, and the 2014-15 seminar series that addressed the challenges artists contend with in a globalized world, which was later anthologized in a book of essays, " Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production " (OR Books, 2017). She is also the author of " At the Lightning Field " (Coffee House Press, 2017) and " A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties " (Publication Studio, 2014).
Ramsey Nasser
Ramsey Nasser is a computer scientist, game designer, and educator based in Brooklyn. He researches programming languages by building tools that make computation more expressive and projects that question the basic assumptions we make about code itself. His games playfully push people out of their comfort zones, and are often built using experimental tools of his design. Ramsey is a former Eyebeam fellow and a professor at schools around New York.
Matt Corwine
Matt is a writer, technologist and communications leader, with roots in the technology, art and electronic music communities in the Pacific Northwest. He currently works in communications at Microsoft Research.
Susan Gladstone