Ari Melenciano is an artist and researcher whose practice investigates cultural behavior as a dynamic cybernetic field. She positions the self as an epistemic and ontological site, serving as a centrifugal point of societal inquiry. Her practice also elevates invisible intelligences, recognizing them as co-authors of perception. Whether she is composing botanical soundscapes or crafting intuitive choreographies to use the body as a cultural research instrument, her practice designs new grammars for understanding existence while reconsidering ancestral practices. Ari's inquiries invite us to navigate imagination as simultaneously a tool to excavate interiority, expand the performance of culture, and recover what the archive has forgotten.


[Or simply — Ari is an artist who synthesizes and translates across systems and spectrums: human and nonhuman, ancestral and futuristic, material and immaterial.]


She has taught courses in new media technologies, design, critical theory, and culture across NYU, the Pratt Institute, Hunter College, Parsons School of Design, and Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai.  And, she is the founder of Afrotectopia, a pioneering social institution that cultivates and expands Black imagination and culture at the nexus of art, design, and technology. Afrotectopia has taken the form of festivals, think tanks, an international fellowship, multi-university incubator, and speculative design book publisher. 


Previously, she worked as a creative technologist at Google’s Creative Lab, where she contributed to projects ranging from machine learning on fingertip-scale hardware to creative direction for the Google for Africa campaign, and generative AI research strategy.