MAXlive produces, develops, and deploys groundbreaking live-art experiences at the intersection of artistic expression, scientific inquiry, and technology.
We foster collaboration between artists, scientists, and creative technologists to amplify critical dialogues, expand access to new ideas, and explore the impacts of innovation and scientific discovery on our shared human experience.
To advance this mission, MAXlive is built on a three-pillar framework: Investment, Incubation, and Presentation.
We Invest in artists by providing financial, logistical, and community support, ensuring they have the necessary resources to execute their creative vision and bring their work to life. This includes direct funding, access to physical production spaces, and the technical infrastructure needed to realize ambitious projects.
We Incubate new and existing projects in our MAXmachina laboratory, fostering an environment where artists, scientists, and technologists can experiment, refine their ideas, and push creative boundaries. This includes creative workshops, peer critiques, and preview showcases to provide deep feedback, iterative creation, and meaningful cross-disciplinary exchange. By offering dramaturgical guidance, production expertise, and access to collaborative networks, we help shape ambitious, interdisciplinary works from concept to realization.
We Present finished works to the public through our MAXlive series, reaching audiences across New York and beyond. These works represent the culmination of our artistic mission. We collaborate with institutions and venues worldwide to deploy and tour them, ensuring they reach broader audiences and continue to inspire critical conversation.
Additionally, MAXlive hosts independent salon series, featuring our creators alongside industry luminaries. These gatherings amplify the dialogue surrounding the work, offering deeper reflection, discussion, and engagement with ideas and community that extend far beyond the performance space.
At MAXlive, we believe that the intersection of art, science, and technology is a powerful and borderless catalyst for change. Our work is driven by a commitment to spark curiosity, provoke thought, and create transformative experiences that shape our future. We seek to expand the boundaries of what art can achieve and how it can inspire meaningful action in the world.
Diversity Equity & Inclusion Statement
Media Art Xploration is committed to increasing the accessibility of science, technology, and the arts.
We aim to reach a diverse public through presentations that defy disciplinary boundaries without sacrificing nuance, rigor, or meaningful debate. We strive to scrutinize the apparatus of scientific research and technological development as we expand the tools of artistic expression by fostering collaborations between artists, technologists, and scientists. We work to cultivate an artistic presentation environment and workplace where all staff, volunteers, artist residents, and partners feel welcome and free to be their full selves. We are committed to supporting a diverse and inclusive space that reflects the communities in which our work is presented and cultivated.
Media Art Xploration is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Our organization does not discriminate on the basis of an individual’s race, sex, age, color, creed, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, socio-economic background, disability status, religion, marital or partnership status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, past incarceration status, veteran or military status and any other attributes protected by law.
Meet the Team
Kay Matschullat
Bio
Also in 2019 she produced We Chose to Go to the Moon, two evenings at Carnegie Hall chronicling the Apollo mission to the moon with St. Luke’s Orchestra in collaboration with America In the Balance.
Directing credits include the classics Threepenny Opera, All’s Well That Ends Well, Skin of Our Teeth, and Love’s Labour’s Lost; She has directed premier productions by renowned writers including former Czech Republic president and playwright Vaclav Havel (The Conspirators), Nobel Prize-winning Caribbean playwright Derek Walcott (To Die For Granada, Pantomime), Pulitzer Prize winner Ariel Dorfman (Widows), and Carson McCullers Talks About Love with Tony Award-winning composer Duncan Sheik and songwriter Suzanne Vega (nominated for a Drama Desk Award).
Matschullat founded the new play program at The Williamstown Theater Festival and InTheRaw at Red Bull Theater. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and recipient of a Master of Arts degree from NYU, Matschullat’s awards include an NEA Directing Fellowship, a TCG Fellowship, a Rubin Foundation Production Grant, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, and Harvard’s Rudolf Arnheim Award for Interdisciplinary Work. As an artist and educator, Matschullat served on NYU’s Tisch full-time faculty for over two decades, taught in Princeton University’s Theater and Dance program and has held artistic residencies at Dartmouth College, Harvard College, Calarts, SCAD, Duke University. She was a guest lecturer at Harvard College in 2019.
Asia Szczepanowska
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Jerome Allen-Smith
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Mariam Cortes
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Lee Dawson
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Iryn Delim
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Max Carlson
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Ben Uribe
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Board of Advisors
Dr. Carl Schoonover
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Vero Bollow
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Rachel Chanoff
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Dr. Sanjoy Som
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Dr. Jack Mostow
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Lucia Pietroiusti
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Robert Cowan, MD, FAAN
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Dr. Penelope Boston
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Dr. Felipe Orduña Bustamante
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Maxwell Neely-Cohen
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Maxwell Neely-Cohen is the author of the novel Echo of the Boom and Editor-at-Large for The Believer.
His essays and non-fiction have been featured in places like The New Republic, Ssense, and BOMB Magazine.
His experiments with literature and technology have been acclaimed by The New York Times Magazine, Electric Literature, The Financial Times, and Google.
In 2019 he was an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works and CultureHub, and part of the Fall cohort at the School for Poetic Computation.
Dr. Sam Gershman
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Dr. Tom Griffiths
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Sally Katz
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Sam Cuddeback
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Paul Roossin
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For the past several years Paul Roossin has been the principal technologist for two medical company start-ups whose suite of products leverage modern Artificial Intelligence techniques to automate diagnostic and therapeutic processes. Prior to this work, Paul was the Science Director of Nanotronics Imaging, Inc., a New York-based microscopy, computer vision, AI, and robotics company that designs and delivers automated inspection and analysis solutions to the semiconductor, pharmaceutical, and materials industries. Paul trained as a neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University where he performed pioneering investigations into the neural substrates of memory consolidation and recall. His interest in artificial intelligence led him to join IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center, where he and his team created the world’s most accurate machine translation system, first used for translating French texts into English. The statistical and information theoretical techniques they pioneered have become the basis for the methods used by all modern translation software. At IBM Research he also designed, produced, and marketed MedSpeak Radiology, the world’s first commercially available continuous speech, large vocabulary speech recognition system. This system and its progeny are currently used to automatically transcribe nearly all radiology reports in the US. As an entrepreneur, he and two colleagues founded ConsumerSearch.com, a consumer product meta-review website; it grew to be one of the largest shopping sites on the web and was sold to The New York Times Digital in 2007. Other prior experience includes CTO positions at the technology startups Tribeca Software and Revonet, Inc., and he was a founder and general manager of Blueshift Ventures, LLC, an early-stage life sciences and technology venture capital firm based in New York City. He is also the founder and CEO of Mental Machinery, Inc., a science and technology consulting firm.
A member of the New York Academy of Science and the Society of Sigma Xi, Paul’s active interests include medical and science policy, the development and use of artificial intelligence technologies, and educational outreach. He was featured as one of the 100 smartest individuals in the New York City area in a New York Magazine cover story. Paul received a B.A. cum laude from New York University in biology and computer science and from 1980 to 1985 was a Ph.D. Fellow at both The Rockefeller University and the Courant Institute of Mathematics.
Wendy Ettinger
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Anne Kreamer
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Anne Kreamer is the author of “It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace” and “Going Gray: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters.” Her latest book, “Risk/Reward: Why Intelligent Leaps and Daring Choices Are the Best Career Moves You Can Make,” decodes what it takes to get ahead and achieve satisfaction in today’s unpredictable new workscape.
Anne has also worked as a columnist for Fast Company and Martha Stewart Living, and has written frequently for Harvard Business Review. Her work has appeared in Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, and Travel + Leisure. Previously, Anne was Executive Vice President and Worldwide Creative Director for the television channels Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite and part of the team that launched SPY magazine. As the Associate Director for the International Television Group for Sesame Workshop, she was integral to building Sesame Street into the pre-eminent global children’s brand.
In 2019, with her daughter, Lucy Andersen, Anne launched Wild & Rare (wildandrare.com) an accessories business showcasing endangered wildlife. By shining a light on individual plants and animals, they hope that Wild & Rare products will function as miniature billboards, focusing our attention on the smaller, more manageable parts of the environmental crisis. 100% of the profits go to organizations working toward the same goal.
Anne graduated from Harvard College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer, Kurt Andersen.
David Bianciardi
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David started his career as a composer and sound designer, using software and technology to make things “talk to each other” to create designed experiences. Today, his transdisciplinary team of artists, designers, technologists, engineers, developers and producers create responsive and expressive media installations in the built environment that foster relationships between storyteller, place and audience.
Gabriel Gaster
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Jared Goldberg
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Adaora Udoji
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She is on the board of NEW INC, serves as an advisor for SXSW Pitch, Knight Foundation 360 Challenge, an advisor to the Broadway Accelerator, as well as a juror for the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival Storyscape Prize (Immersive).Previously, she was an executive at RLab and ran a media-tech startup, News Deeply. Before she covered some of the most compelling stories of our time as a broadcast journalist as correspondent and anchor, winning many awards including recognition by The National Academy of Television Arts, and Sciences and the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award for reporting on the Afghan war and Hurricane Katrina respectively.
She is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts and graduated from the University of Michigan and received a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law. She holds dual American and Irish Citizenship and has lived on four continents.
Dr. David Haskell
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Kathryn Arffa
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Dr. Andrew Farnsworth
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Thank you to our Board
We thank our Board of Directors, David Bianciardi, Nancy Eswein, Wendy Ettinger, Carol Klein, Carl Schoonover, Dale Matschullat, Elizabeth Grayer, Eric Van Speights and Kay Matschullat.
Special Thanks to The Office, Integrated Media and Design Department, NYU and Paul Weiss.