Biography

Amelia Winger-Bearskin (MFA, University of Texas) is an artist who empowers people to leverage bleeding edge technology to effect positive change in the world. She is an Innovation Fellow at the Land Acknowledgement Lab for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture: Honor Native Land Initiative. She founded the project Wampum.Codes which is both an award-winning podcast and ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation. She continued her research in 2021 at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning. In 2019 she was an invited presenter to His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama, at his world headquarters in Dharamsala for the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion. In 2018 she was awarded a MacArthur/Sundance Institute fellowship for her 360 video immersive installation in collaboration with the artist Wendy Red Star (supported by the Google JUMP Creator program). IDEA New Rochelle, the non-profit she founded in partnership with the New Rochelle Mayor’s Office, won the 2018 $1 Million Dollar Bloomberg Mayors Challenge for their VR/AR citizen toolkit to help the community co-design their city. In 2018 she also was awarded the 100k Alternative Realities Prize for her Virtual Reality Project from Engadget and Verizon Media. Winger-Bearskin is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.