Michael Naimark is a producer, inventor, and scholar in the fields of virtual reality and new media art. He is best known for his work in projection mapping, virtual travel, live global video, and cultural preservation, and refers to this body of work as “place representation.” His work has been seen in over 300 art exhibitions, film festivals, and presentations around the world, and he has been awarded 16 patents relating to cameras, display, haptics, and live. Michael has directed projects with support from Apple, Disney, Atari, Panavision, Lucasfilm, Interval, and Google; and from National Geographic, UNESCO, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Exploratorium, the Banff Centre, Ars Electronica, the ZKM, and the Paris Metro. Since 2009, he has served as faculty at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, USC Cinema's Interactive Media Division, and the MIT Media Lab. In 2015, Naimark was appointed Google’s first-ever “resident artist” in their new VR division, and for Fall 2017, he is Visiting Associate Arts Professor at NYU Shanghai, to teach VR / AR "Fundamentals" and learn about VR / AR in China.

Eugene Tan is Director of National Gallery Singapore. He was co-curator of the inaugural Singapore Biennale in 2006 and curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Art Biennale. He has also curated exhibitions including Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond (2016), of Human Scale and Beyond: Experience and Transcendence (2012), The Burden of Representation: Abstraction in Asia Today (2010), Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia (2008), as well as exhibitions of Lee Mingwei (2010), Jompet (2010), Charwei Tsai (2009) and Nipan Oranniwesna (2009). His previous appointments include Programme Director (Special Projects) of Singapore Economic Development Board, Director of Exhibitions at the Osage Gallery (Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai), Director for the Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art – Singapore and Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore.

Mr Eric Chin was appointed the Director of the National Archives of Singapore in 2012. He was a lawyer by profession but acted on a long-standing personal interest in library and archival sciences by completing a Master’s in Information Studies in 2010 at the Nanyang Technological University. He is currently President of the Forum of National Archivists under the International Council of Archives.

Patrick Mok received the doctorate degree in History, The University of Hong Kong. He has a wide range of research interests from history, heritage and cultural study, cultural policies, cultural/creativity indicators to cultural-creative economy in Hong Kong and China.
From 2008 to 2014, Dr. Mok served as consultant and manager in the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKU) for the development of the “Hong Kong Memory Project”, a digital and research project for the preservation of Hong Kong’s historical and cultural heritage.
He was investigator of a number of projects on digital library, copyright research and policy studies on creative economy, including: “A Review Study on Cultural Audit” (2009-2010) commissioned by the Central Policy Unit of HKSAR Government; “A study on Hong Kong Design Index” (2010) by the Hong Kong Design Center. Recent work includes the “Study on Macau’s Cultural and Creative Industries Index” (2011-12) and its follow-up studies (2013-15), both commissioned by the Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Macau SAR Government.

Linda Volkers is the Marketing Manager at Rijksmuseum. She is responsible for the International and Digital Marketing of the in 2013 reopened Rijkmuseum that in its first year welcomed over 2,2 million visitors. Rijksmuseum received multiple rewards for its innovative digital and social activities, like Rijksstudio: SpinAwards 2013, 2 Dutch Interactive Awards 2013, 3 Museum and the Web Awards and the European Design Awards. Linda has a track record in online and offline marketing and communications. Before joining the Rijksmuseum, Linda held several management positions at digital agency Jungle Minds, worked in the financial sector and as a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.

Yvonne Tham is the Chief Executive Officer of The Esplanade Company Ltd and she is responsible for the overall management and programming direction of The Esplanade.

Yvonne was formerly the Deputy Chief Executive of the National Arts Council as well as the Director of the Arts and Heritage Division of the then-Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts. Between 2002 to 2009, she was involved in the development of policies such as the Renaissance City plans, and the setting up of the pre-tertiary School of the Arts, the Design Singapore council, and the National Gallery.

Professor Sarah Kenderdine researches at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. In widely exhibited installation works, she has amalgamated cultural heritage with new media art practice, especially in the realms of interactive cinema, augmented reality and embodied narrative. She is considered a pioneer in the field digital heritage, digital museology, digital humanities and data visualisation and is a regular keynote speaker at related forums internationally. In addition to her exhibition work she conceives and designs large-scale immersive visualisation systems for public audiences, industry and researchers. Since 1991 Sarah had authored numerous scholarly articles and six books. She has produced 80 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide including a museum complex in India and received a number of major international awards for this work. In 2017, Sarah was appointed Professor of Digital Museology at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she has built a new laboratory for experimental museology (eM+), exploring the convergence of aesthetic practice, visual analytics and cultural data. She is also Director and lead curator of EPFL’s new art/science initiative, inaugurated in 2016 as ArtLab.

As a “cyberculturalist”, Kevin Lim (PhD) studies the co-evolution of network and culture. He is interested in ways to promote creative economies, by helping people understand how the participatory and self-governing aspects of social computing generates new forms of social, economic and legal affordances. Transitioning from an academic to a social enterprise, he resonated with the aspirations of National Gallery Singapore since pre-opening days, which is why he has spent the last nine years evolving across diverse roles at the Gallery, from Visitor Experience, to Corporate Planning, to his latest venture at CoLab X, an innovation provocateur role at the Gallery. Operating CoLabX for the past three years, luck truly is a combination of preparation and opportunity as little did he expect to receive support to launch a museum innovation lab at the Gallery slated for 2020, where numerous domains are saturated by startups, ArtTech remains as vast as blue ocean especially for the Southeast Asian region. By promoting this cause, we not only discover museum-centric applications of new technology by local startups, but we live up to our the ambition to establish Singapore as a thought-leader, and facilitator, of a vibrant art ecosystem for the region. Finally, the Gallery’s innovation lab would serve as a dynamic space to engage non-native museum visitors, introducing a new accessible channel for aspiring young and adult citizens to engage with art.

Seb Chan is the chief experience officer (CXO) at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image where he will be responsible for a holistic, multi-channel, design strategy for the institution. Until August 2015, he was director of Digital & Emerging Media, at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. There he was responsible for the museum's recent digital renewal and its transformation into an interactive, playful new museum reopened after a 3-year rebuilding and reimagining process. He also has had a parallel life in electronic music and art organising and curating festivals, international touring, and publishing.

Angelita Teo was appointed as Director of the National Museum of Singapore (NMS) in July 2013. In her first year, she welcomed over 1 million visitors to NMS – a record for any museum in Singapore. Angelita was awarded the Public Administration Medal (Bronze) in 2014 for her contributions towards the development of a vibrant cultural and heritage sector in Singapore. Between 2014 and 2015, Angelita helmed the Museum’s complete revamp of its permanent galleries, which reopened in September 2015. Since 2012, Angelita has run the Festival and Precinct Development Division of the National Heritage Board (NHB), and is the festival director of the iconic Singapore Heritage Festival and Singapore Night Festival, which together reach out to over 2 million visitors annually. In 2016, she undertook the management of the Museum Roundtable Unit, which aims to build and facilitate a stronger museum – going culture in Singapore. Angelita started her museum career as an Assistant Curator in 1996. She pursued a Masters in Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne in 2011, under a full government scholarship from the NHB.

Kennie Ting is the Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum and the Peranakan Museum, and concurrently Group Director, Museums at the National Heritage Board (NHB) Singapore, overseeing national museums and festivals managed by the NHB. As Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum, he has overseen the shift in the museum’s curatorial approach from a geographical focus to a thematic, cross-cultural focus, and has helmed recent exhibitions on the Arts of Myanmar, Korea, Angkor and Java, on the material culture of cosmopolitan Asian Port Cities, and on contemporary Chinese Couture. He is interested in teh history of travel and the heritage of Asian port cities and is the author of the books, The Romance of the Grand Tour – 100 Years of Travel in South East Asia and Singapore 1819 – A Living Legacy.

Sean Lee Huang Han, is the Director of Heritage Conservation Centre (HCC) of the National Heritage Board (NHB), which is a statutory board in the Ministry of Community, Culture and Youth. He has been with NHB since July 2011. HCC is the national repository of the national heritage collection with the primary tasks of managing, caring and facilitating physical and digital access to the collections.

Stylianos Dritsas is a research faculty in Architecture and Sustainable Design at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. His expertise is in Design Computation (Automation, Optimization, AI) and Digital Fabrication (Additive Manufacturing and Industrial Robotics). He has consulted several high-profile projects in Singapore, his research work has been published in journals across multiple disciplines, and his design work received creativity and innovation awards. Prior to Singapore, he practiced in London an Associate Principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates and taught as visiting faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA, USA, Architectural Association in London, UK and EcolePolytechniqueFederalein Lausanne, Switzerland. His education includes a diploma in Architecture Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and a graduate degree in Design Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He is a registered Architect, ARB/UK and Architect/Engineer, TEE/Greece.

Fiona Moore is the inaugural Coordinator, Object Based Learning and Collections Management for Arts West in the Faculty of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. In this roles she is responsible for developing object based learning opportunities across the Faculty, liaising with academics and staff from the University’s Cultural Collections to embed the collections into the Faculty’s teaching programs. She has a BA (Hons) in Art History, a Postgraduate Diploma in Art Curatorship and Museum management and a Masters in Fine Arts (Research) all obtained from the University of Melbourne. She has worked as a sessional subject coordinator and guest lecturer in the Masters of Art Curatorship Program at the university. She has extensive experiencing working in the museum and gallery sector in the area of registration having held positions at a number of cultural institutions in Australia including the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. Fiona is also PhD candidate in Art History in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne

Honor Harger is the Executive Director for ArtScience Museum, where she charts the overall direction and strategy for the museum. She has over 15 years of experience of working at the intersection between art and technology, having held several key appointments in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, as well as curated many international exhibitions and events around the world. These include being the artistic director of Lighthouse in Brighton, UK; director of the AV Festival, the UK’s largest biennial of media art, film and music; and the first webcasting curator for London’s Tate Modern. She has also given lectures at TED and LIFT conferences, the European Agency, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, California Institute of the Arts and the American Film Institute.

Jane M. Jacobs (BA Hons, MA, PhD, CFBA) is Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Before joining the Yale-NUS she taught at the University of Melbourne (1991-2000) and The University of Edinburgh (2001-2011). She is the author of Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (Routledge, 1996), Cities of Different (Guilford, 1998), and Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (MIT Press, 2014). Her current research is on the relationship between building science research and design innovation, a curiosity that will form the basis of her next book. Professor Jacobs shares her name with a very famous, but now dead, urban scholar the Jane Jacobs who authored Death and Life of Great American Cities and so has become an expert in professional disambiguation.

Chris Michaels is Head of Digital and Publishing at the British Museum. His mission is to help the world's first museum achieve its founding goal of being the Museum of and for the world, by fully embracing the potential of mobile, the cloud and big data to transform our visitors' experiences of our programmes and collection.
Chris was previously CEO at children’s education mobile startup Mindshapes. Backed by Index Ventures and some of the world's greatest gaming entrepreneurs, Mindshapes released over 40 apps with partners including the BBC and the Jim Henson Company, winning multiple awards and delighting children and families around the world.
Chris has previously been an SVP at international media company Chorion; Digital Publisher at HarperCollins; and started professional life in advertising. He has a PhD in American Literature from the University of Bristol.

Jenny Wong heads the teams in IMDA’s Digital Inclusion Division for Silver Infocomm Initiative and the Home Access Programme. She oversees the annual Silver IT Fest, which is an annual festival comprising a series of events such as exhibition, seminars and IT classes targeted to encourage seniors to lead a digital lifestyle. Prior to her role in Digital Inclusion, she was one of the pioneer members in the Personal Data Protection Commission and led in the development of the communications and outreach strategies for the Commission. She was instrumental in the rolling out of a national training programme under the Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ) framework to build data protection capabilities as well as the development of the National Infocomm Competency Framework when she was with the Manpower Development Division in IDA. Ms Wong graduated with a Bachelor of Social Science with Honours from the National University of Singapore.

Gene Tan is the Executive Director of the Singapore Bicentennial Office and helms the planning of the commemoration including its flagship event, From Singapore to Singaporean: The Bicentennial Experience.  

He was formerly a director at the National Library of Singapore and Director of the Singapore Memory Project, and President of the Library Association of Singapore.  Gene was also the Creative Director of The Future of Us Exhibition which was the capstone event for Singapore’s SG50 celebrations in 2015. The exhibition pieced together the hopes and dreams of Singaporeans for their future.

Debbie Ding is a visual artist and technologist working between London and Singapore. She graduated MA Design Interactions from Royal College of Art (London). She reworks and appropriates formal, qualitative approaches to collecting, labelling, organizing, and interpreting assemblages of information – using this to open up possibilities for alternative constructions of knowledge. Inquiries are sparked off by the unexpected discoveries and hidden labours of amateur explorers – whose voices are often concealed by the contemporary professionalization of academic disciplines. Prototyping is used as a conceptual strategy for artistic production, iteratively exploring potential breakthroughs and dead ends faced by amateur archaeologists, citizen social scientists, and machines (programmed to perform roles of cultural craftsmanship) in the pursuit of knowledge. Works take the form of computer-aided investigations into archaeological and historical finds (eg: the former island of Pulau Saigon, 19th century colonial shipwrecks), studies of changing features within urban geography, and informal approaches to collecting and mapping.

Simone Stoltz is a Lecturer in Information and Media at the Reinwardt Academy at Amsterdam. She previously worked as a manager for several collections at museums including The RijksMuseum and the Amsterdam Castle. She has been a museum advisor on the subject of e-Culture and Digitization for several years. She is passionate in educating a new generation of heritage professionals in media, information and presentation. Her main challenge is to help students into shaping their own vision at the future of heritage in a creative but structured way. She delivers masterclasses, workshops and presentations at Universities and conferences in the Netherlands and abroad.

Mr Lucian Teo works in Google, helping internet users in Asia stay safe online by teaching them tips and tricks to avoid scams, phishing and account hijacking. He believes the open web is an amazing force for good, and that the world would benefit from more Asian innovation, culture and creativity online. Prior to Google, Lucian worked on digital communications in the Singapore Government.

Michael Naimark is a producer, inventor, and scholar in the fields of virtual reality and new media art. He is best known for his work in projection mapping, virtual travel, live global video, and cultural preservation, and refers to this body of work as “place representation.” His work has been seen in over 300 art exhibitions, film festivals, and presentations around the world, and he has been awarded 16 patents relating to cameras, display, haptics, and live. Michael has directed projects with support from Apple, Disney, Atari, Panavision, Lucasfilm, Interval, and Google; and from National Geographic, UNESCO, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Exploratorium, the Banff Centre, Ars Electronica, the ZKM, and the Paris Metro. Since 2009, he has served as faculty at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, USC Cinema's Interactive Media Division, and the MIT Media Lab. In 2015, Naimark was appointed Google’s first-ever “resident artist” in their new VR division, and for Fall 2017, he is Visiting Associate Arts Professor at NYU Shanghai, to teach VR / AR "Fundamentals" and learn about VR / AR in China.

Professor Sarah Kenderdine researches at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. In widely exhibited installation works, she has amalgamated cultural heritage with new media art practice, especially in the realms of interactive cinema, augmented reality and embodied narrative. She is considered a pioneer in the field digital heritage, digital museology, digital humanities and data visualisation and is a regular keynote speaker at related forums internationally. In addition to her exhibition work she conceives and designs large-scale immersive visualisation systems for public audiences, industry and researchers. Since 1991 Sarah had authored numerous scholarly articles and six books. She has produced 80 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide including a museum complex in India and received a number of major international awards for this work. In 2017, Sarah was appointed Professor of Digital Museology at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she has built a new laboratory for experimental museology (eM+), exploring the convergence of aesthetic practice, visual analytics and cultural data. She is also Director and lead curator of EPFL’s new art/science initiative, inaugurated in 2016 as ArtLab.

Debbie Ding is a visual artist and technologist working between London and Singapore. She graduated MA Design Interactions from Royal College of Art (London). She reworks and appropriates formal, qualitative approaches to collecting, labelling, organizing, and interpreting assemblages of information – using this to open up possibilities for alternative constructions of knowledge. Inquiries are sparked off by the unexpected discoveries and hidden labours of amateur explorers – whose voices are often concealed by the contemporary professionalization of academic disciplines. Prototyping is used as a conceptual strategy for artistic production, iteratively exploring potential breakthroughs and dead ends faced by amateur archaeologists, citizen social scientists, and machines (programmed to perform roles of cultural craftsmanship) in the pursuit of knowledge. Works take the form of computer-aided investigations into archaeological and historical finds (eg: the former island of Pulau Saigon, 19th century colonial shipwrecks), studies of changing features within urban geography, and informal approaches to collecting and mapping.

Yvonne Tham is the Chief Executive Officer of The Esplanade Company Ltd and she is responsible for the overall management and programming direction of The Esplanade.

Yvonne was formerly the Deputy Chief Executive of the National Arts Council as well as the Director of the Arts and Heritage Division of the then-Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts. Between 2002 to 2009, she was involved in the development of policies such as the Renaissance City plans, and the setting up of the pre-tertiary School of the Arts, the Design Singapore council, and the National Gallery.

Yeo Kirk Siang is currently the Director of the Heritage Research and Assessment Division (HRA) at the National Heritage Board (NHB). The division focuses on the research, documentation and commemoration of Singapore’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage. He was also involved in the development of “Our SG Heritage Plan”, a master plan that outlines the broad strategies for Singapore’s heritage sector over 2018 to 2022.
Before his current appointment, Kirk Siang worked in a wide range of portfolios in NHB, and was involved in the preservation of sites and monuments, community outreach and strategic planning. Kirk Siang was with the Ministry of National Development (MND) prior to joining NHB, and was responsible for developing policies and strategies related to the built environment, including sustainable development in Singapore.

Warren Fernandez is Editor-in-Chief of English/Malay/Tamil Media in Singapore Press Holdings. He is also Editor of The Straits Times, Singapore’s biggest selling English daily newspaper. He joined the paper in 1990 as a political reporter and rose to become News Editor. He later also served as Foreign Editor and Deputy Editor. He left to join Royal Dutch Shell in 2008 as a Global Manager for its Future Energy project, before returning to the paper in February 2012 as its editor. 

He graduated with First Class Honours from Oxford University, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and also has a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Both degrees were obtained on Singapore Press Holdings scholarships.

He is a board member of the National Parks Board (NParks), SPH (Overseas) Ltd, Straits Times Press Pte Ltd, The Straits Times Press (1975) Limited, Asia News Network (ANN), Singapore Symphony Group (SSO), National Arts Council and Chairman of The Straits Times School Pocket Money Fund.
He has recently been elected President of the World Editors Forum (WEF) which is the leading network for print and digital editors of newspapers and news organisations around the world. WEF is part of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).