Society. Spaces. Screens

Nicholas Pilarski is an award-winning filmmaker who co-creates interactive and emerging media. The stories he co-creates attempt to address issues related to historicized poverty and class-based trauma. Pilarski makes art that is not “about” communities, but rather “of” them – helping build ecosystems where traditional lines between subject/author, teacher/student, and spectator/producer are intentionally contested and reimagined. By developing technology with the communities he partners with, Pilarski helps materialize alternatives to media structures that often define our landscapes.

He has been profiled as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Cinema and his work has been identified as an exemplar of community-created practice by the MIT Co-Creation Studio. The collective he co-founded and co-directs, Peoples Culture, has work archived in the permanent collection of The Smithsonian: National Museum of African American History and Culture and has been nominated for the Tim Herightenton Trust’s Visionary Award three years in a row for their peacemaking and community visioning efforts in localities of geographic conflict. Pilarski has also worked as an advisor to the NYC’s Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation and the Center for Court Innovation. In both roles, he continues to advocate for community storytelling to explore neighborhood-led-solutions that promote upward economic mobility and increased equity.

Sarah M. Bassett is a Professor of Practice in the School of Public Affairs, Emergency Management & Homeland Security program at Arizona State University and co-Director of the Resilient Visions (RV) CoLab. She specializes in a transdisciplinary planning practice that addresses the social and spatial effects of natural and technological hazards. Core to this is working in partnership with communities on how to adapt and manage their risk from these uncertain conditions in an effort to support a more humane urbanism. This work combines place-based practices, spatial computing, and policy advocacy to connect local needs with long-range planning and policy change. Bassett was elected to the national board of the American Planning Association’s Technology Division in 2022.

As the co-founder and director of urbanism at Peoples Culture, a collective in New York City, her co-created work uses narrative and emerging media (spatial computing) to create connections to places and people, spanning diverse contexts and topics around uncertainty from climate adaptation and mass incarceration to geo-political conflict and terminal disease, that help drive policy change. Bassett has published and exhibited multiple co-created works which have been featured in the New York Times, is archived with The Smithsonian Institution, featured in MIT’s Co-Creation Studio and publications, and (most personally meaningful) has successfully influenced policy change in both North Carolina and New York.