Lena Chen is a Chinese American sex worker, writer, and artist creating performances and socially engaged art in live and virtual contexts. Awarded “Best Emerging Talent” at B3 Biennial of the Moving Image (Frankfurt) and the Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award, she has exhibited and performed at Transmediale (Berlin), Die Digitale (Düsseldorf), Museum of Modern Art (Antwerp), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), and Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. She has spoken widely on digital performance practices, feminist activism, and sex work at Oxford, Yale, Stanford, SXSW, HOPE, and re:publica. She has been awarded grants and residencies from Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (Pittsburgh), Office of Public Art (Pittsburgh), INVERSE Performance Art Festival (Bentonville), Burning Man Global Arts Fund (San Francisco), Civic Media Lab (Dnipro, Ukraine), and Women’s Media Center (Washington, D.C.). She earned a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University, and is currently completing a MFA at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art, where she holds the Lea Simonds Fellowship.

Maggie Oates is a computer scientist and researcher-artist focused on making privacy and security tools work for more people. She was mostly recently the Research Lead for Project Amelia, an open-world immersive theater production that invited hundreds of audience members into a fictional start-up office as the company navigated ethical and privacy issues in their AI products. She has a BS in Computer Science, an MS in Societal Computing, and is currently completing a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University. With a fantastic research team, she published the award-winning work “Turtles, Locks, and Bathrooms,” exploring visual metaphors of privacy. She has presented interactive exhibits on privacy and security for audiences ranging from high schoolers to lawyers.