Nikita Shokhov is a New York-based artist. He has been exploring various aspects of the human condition in his visual art practice; some of them are humanism in modern technology, the human unconscious, the carnivalesque, whiteness and blackness, and queer phenomenology. His works discourse critical thinking, philosophy, documentary approach, and political and social agendas. Nikita has always worked with lens-based media, from traditional photography to volumetric cinematic forms. In his current practice, he uses a real-time 3D graphics engine, immersive media, and moving images, synthesizing physical performance and interactive digital worlds in a unified time-space.

Tyechia Thompson is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech whose areas of research include African American literature, digital humanities, and manuscript and archival studies. She is the creator of “Baldwin’s Paris,” a geospatial literary tool that maps over 100 references that James Baldwin made to places in Paris. She is the instructor and executive producer of the mobile application “Hip Hop Lit” in the Apple App Store. She is the recipient of an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication supporting the project “Place, Memory, Poetry, and the James A. Emanuel Papers at the Library of Congress.” She co-creator and co-host of the podcast The Inside Story, funded by an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Justice Seed Grant for the project “Building an Institute for Empathic Immersive Narrative.” She has published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Afro-Publishing Without Walls/IOPN, Fire!!!: The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, and the College Language Association Journal.