Artist Statement

Transmedia storytelling provides engagement opportunities around what it means to ‘be’ in the world and the moral choices that further a goal of making the world a better place.

• Ayoka Chenzira  is a filmmaker, interactive digital media artist, educator and a recognized pioneer in African-American independent cinema. She is a graduate of  New York University (B.F.A. Film), Columbia University Teacher’s College (M.A. in
  Education) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Ph.D. Digital Media). Ayoka has created numerous award-winning films that span fiction, animation, documentary and performance. She received a Sony Innovator Award for her early work with converging film, video and computer animation, and the Apple Computer Distinguished Educator Award for her work with storytelling and digital technology. There have been many international retrospectives of her films which are also are in permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ayoka’s current work is in transmedia storytelling. As an interactive filmmaker, she uses custom-built and off-the-shelf digital frameworks to combine the moving image with interactive websites, mobile phones, video, projection and sensing technologies. She is currently a professor Spelman College in Atlanta Georgia. She is the founding director of the Digital Moving Image Salon, which teaches students to produce documentary films for various digital platforms.

Full text and images (PDF) p. 50-51