Curator, executive producer and pioneer of immersive creative media.

Liz is Curator of Venice Biennale’s International Film Festival's Official Selection and Competition programme Venice Immersive. She is an Executive Producer of award-winning immersive content and helped found and lead accelerator programme, CreativeXR, managed by Arts Council England and Digital Catapult. Liz is CEO & Founder of trail-blazing innovation company Power to the Pixel. She has an extensive network and knowledge of international talent, financiers and distributors across the immersive entertainment and arts space.

Throughout her career, Liz has helped international media businesses and artists to innovate and adapt their practice to evolving platforms, tools and audiences. She has advised countless leading international festivals, media organisations and national and regional funds.

At Venice Film Festival she was instrumental in the launch of Venice Immersive in 2017, the first and only official immersive content selection and competition in an A-list festival. Venice Immersive has helped establish XR as a new artistic and entertainment form and has pushed the boundaries of exhibiting immersive works. It is currently the world’s most extensive annual exhibition of Immersive Arts. 

At CreativeXR Liz helped design and lead this unique accelerator programme as Executive Producer. The programme has supported the development and finance of 60 XR projects by leading UK creative teams, many that have gone on to win major awards including; Maya: The Birth of a Superhero (2023) Goliath: Playing With Reality (2021), Madrid Noir (2021), (Hi)story of a Painting (2022), Austerity on Trial (2021) and Common Ground (2020).

At Power to the Pixel, Liz created the first international programmes for developing, financing and showcasing interactive and immersive works. Incubator, the Pixel Lab helped develop over 100 projects and Power to the Pixel: The Cross-Media Forum, run in association with the BFI London Film Festival over 10 years, brought together leading talent and financiers and created the first project finance market for interactive projects and VR exhibition in London.

Liz began her media career in the film business. She set up and ran the UK office for Next Wave Films a division of the Independent Film Channel in the US from 1998 to 2002. Next Wave was a pioneer in the production, finance and sales of micro-budget features and digital filmmaking. Their award-winning films include Christopher Nolan's Following (Winner: Tiger Award, Rotterdam ’99, Silver Hitchcock, Dinard ’99), Kate Davis' Southern Comfort (Grand Jury Prize, Sundance ’01) and Josh Aronson's Sound and Fury (Grand Jury Prize, Sundance ’00, Academy Award nomination ’01).

She is invited regularly to speak at leading events and institutions around the world including the Cannes International Film Festival, Berlinale, Unity for Humanity Summit, Screen International Conferences, TEDx Transmedia, BAFTA and many more around the world. She has served as a jury member for numerous international festivals and funding programmes. 

Liz is a board director of The Space commissioning fund for digital arts projects, a founding board member of Immerse UK whose content subgroup she chairs and Latin American new media organisation Mediamorfosis. She is a member of BAFTA, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, The Guild of Future Architects and a fellow of the RSA. 

Mike Salmon, aka Manglebird, is an immersive producer and co-founder of the creative technology studio Altered Realities.  Michael is a producer at Venice Immersive and a tutor at the Biennale College focusing on virtual worlds. 

He has been part of the XR community since Oculus shipped their first dev kits in 2014.  During his time as head of Immersive Technology at NBCUniversal, he set up the studio's first dedicated immersive entertainment team and was the creator/producer on many XR productions.  These include large-scale, multi-million dollar experiences, technical R&D projects, and 2 years of researching and prototyping a social VR product: Universal Worlds.  His work includes Eleven Eleven (creator/producer) which launched at SXSW, featured in the Best of VR category at Venice, and was nominated for a Producers Guild of America Innovation Award. He co-produced the hybrid TV/VR series Halycon for Syfy channel, a Primetime Emmy finalist.  During the campaign for Halcyon, he ran the world's first VR press junket using the social VR platform AltspaceVR. 

Mads Damsbo is a creative producer focused on developing new narratives, utilizing new technology; provoking unexpected emotions and experiences in diverse audiences. Schooled as a Producer from the progressive filmschool Super16 and with a bachelor in Media Directing from the Danish School of Media and Journalism, Mads has since become an expert on the production of immersive media narratives, giving lectures, organizing workshops and teaching masterclasses all around the world. 

Mads has always found himself at the creative bleeding-edge in the development of new media experiences. His experience in filmmaking and storytelling combined with a passion for new technology, art and design has spurred a variety of progressive projects that seek to challenge the way good stories come to life and allow audiences to explore the immersive storytelling world. As the founder of Makropol he has raised over 5 million € and started several new companies, including the app startup Recho that won the prestigious Venture Cup in 2015 and the deep learning Kaspar AI a company focused on using AI to co-create audiovisual storytelling.

Mads’ work includes The Doghouse (2014) – a first- person film installation screened at Festival Nouveau Cinema, NYFF, Cannes NEXT and The Future of Storytelling in New York; The Shared Individual (2016) – a collective VR experience premiering at Idfa DocLab; and Doom Room (2017) – a mixed reality VR performance that was highlighted at Sheffield Docfest and Rotterdam International Film Festival. Recently he produced The Shadow and End Of Night, that won for best Immersive Narrative in Venice. 

Currently Mads is producing selected immersive projects including the worlds first feature film written by an AI, acting as Head of Studies at the European Creators’ Lab and working as CEO and creative producer at Kaspar AI. 

Cenk is a creative technologist and new media artist. He researches and educates at the ./studio3, Institute for Experimental Architecture of Innsbruck University, co-founded Me AndOther Me, a new media-driven artistic and architectural research studio exploring the future of our spatial experiences and communication through practical applications of social mixed reality experiences focused on online culture, post-human critique, and the spatial web. He is a board member of the CSC Immersive Arts. A Centre for The Expanded Moving Image – the Immersive Arts Department of the National Film School of Italy.

As a producer, Oriane has been working in the audiovisual and immersive field for the past ten years. She notably produced Isle of the Dead by Benjamin Nuel, winner of Best Story VR Award at Venice in 2018. Later, Meet Mortaza VR by Joséphine Derobe and The Passengers by Ziad Touma were both selected at SXSW 2021.

Also in 2021, Oriane joined the award-winning ATLAS V team as a senior producer. She is the lead producer of the VR documentary series Missing Pictures, starring Abel Ferrara, Catherine Hardwicke and Naomi Kawase that premiered in Tribeca in 2022. Her most recent production, Emperor by Marion Burger and Ilan J. Cohen, has been awarded as Best Achievement at Venice Immersive 2023 and Best VR Experience at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2024.

Founded by Corine Meijers in 2019, Studio Biarritz is now an established production house that specializes in audiovisual projects that cross borders. Studio Biarritz develops its own projects, but we also love collaborating with filmmakers, artists and partners from all over the world to produce stories with a lot of heart that are relevant for our trying times. We cross borders in 1) form, technology and subject matter, in 2) collaboration with filmmakers, artists & partners and 3) in audience reach, distributed on multiple platforms.

As a creative producer at Studio Biarritz, Corine Meijers is also involved as a (script) coach for several VR and immersive projects at the Flemish Audiovisual Fund as well as the Film Fund in The Netherlands. She is a mentor at the Playgrounds NEXT talent development program in Brabant (NL), the Immersive & Interactive I media training for scientists, at the Silbersalz Institute (DE) and was involved as a mentor at the immersive section of the Venice College Biennale and European Creators Lab in 2024.

As the Artistic Director of the Taipei-based Riverbed Theatre Company, Craig has written and directed over fifty original image-based performances, including productions in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, China, France, Germany, and the United States. His first VR experience, All That Remains, premiered at the 79th Venice Film Festival (2022) and won the prize for Best Immersive Experience at the 2023 Luxembourg Film Festival and the Best 360 VR Film at the 2024 Kaohsiung Film Festival. His most recent VR experience, Over the Rainbow, premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and was shown as part of the "Best of" section at the 80th Venice Film Festival. The project won the Panorama Award at the 2024 Festival du Nouveau Cinema. Filmmaker Magazine selected Craig as one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film 2023.” Craig is also a sculptor and installation artist whose work has been shown at the Asian Biennial, Venice Biennale Collateral Events, Kobe Biennale, Taipei Biennale, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei MOCA, and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. A former Fulbright Senior Scholar and Mellon Foundation Humanities Unbounded Fellow, Craig received his Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and is a Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Grinnell College. 

Nikolaj Stausbøl (Staus) is a future experience designer with a focus on anchoring playful interactive stories into reality. His projects has a tendency to lean towards emulating photorealism w. volumetric capturing and shader work pipelines and anything that allows for a near realtime dialogue with code and digital creativity; Node based tools, generative AI storytelling, algorave live-coding, etc.
As a Creative Technology Director and Partner at Manyone, he’s build numerous large scale XR and spatial projects for both large corporate clients and cultural institutions. His work has been exhibited at Venice Film Festival, SXSW, Copenhagen Contemporary, Las Vegas and United Nations Climate Assembly in Kenya to name a few.