CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – July 20, 2026 – MIT Open Documentary Lab today announced that Lab Director Sarah Wolozin is stepping down from her role, effective September 1, 2026. Wolozin’s departure marks the culmination of fifteen years of leadership that has shaped the global documentary media field.

Under Wolozin’s tenure, Open Documentary Lab has flourished, reinforcing its position as an industry catalyst that unites, sustains, and grows a diverse creative field. Working with Lab founder and Principal Investigator, Professor William Uricchio, Wolozin served as the first director, designing its programming, resources, research, and convenings, forging partnerships supporting artists and scholars, and creating opportunities for students.

Wolozin created Docubase, a database tracking the people, projects, and tools transforming the documentary field, to make the field accessible to anyone with a computer. She also co-founded an online publication, Immerse, the Co-Creation Studio, the Independent XR Distribution Coalition, and recently served as executive producer and investigator of Layers of Place: Austin, an Augmented Reality Exhibit by ODL alum that premiered at SXSW.

“Building a lab with extraordinarily committed and talented colleagues and supporting and collaborating with bold, visionary artists has been a great honor. In this time of crisis, democratizing tools for truth-telling and imagining better futures are needed more than ever. I am grateful to MIT for providing a place for this work to thrive,” said Wolozin. “I am incredibly proud of what we have accomplished together – the resilience, innovation, and boundless talent of this creative sector continually inspires me. While this was a difficult decision, I know that Open Documentary Lab has an opportunity to restructure and is poised for continued success and is in excellent hands.”

Wolozin’s leadership has earned her significant recognition, including an insignia of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 2023. Prior to joining MIT, she had over a decade of experience working on award-winning documentary and media across multiple platforms.

“On behalf of the Lab, I want to express our gratitude to Sarah for her leadership over the past fifteen years,” said Ceasar McDowell, Principal Investigator of the Lab and Co-Creation Studio, and Professor of Practice at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. “Sarah’s advocacy, creativity, and strategic acumen have been instrumental in elevating immersive documentary on both national and international stages, guiding us through significant change and opportunity.”

The Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio will undergo restructuring in the fall of 2026 and will announce a new programmatic framework. Meanwhile, select programs and projects will continue, including the AI + Documentary Working Group and the WORLDING research initiative, as well as internal documentary and research projects. The ODL Fellows program will go on hiatus in the fall, with an anticipated return in early 2027. Wolozin will actively support this transition to ensure seamless continuation of programming and the Lab’s mission to support the field in these critical times.

With generous support from:

Dear WORLDING community,

It’s spring in the northern hemisphere, and the season brings in the WORLDING 2026 incubator, gathering teams who are collectively envisioning climate futures by joining forces from diverse disciplines all over the world.

In this newsletter, find out how to register for the live-streamed closing Keynote of WORLDING on May 27, 12 noon-1:30 pm ET and learn about this year’s cohort.

IMAGE: Imaginary Atlas: Amazonia. courtesy Gabriela Bila

WITNESS AN IMAGINARY ATLAS COME ALIVE IN AMAZÔNIA AT OUR CLOSING KEYNOTE

Please join us at an unmissable livestream WORLDING keynote from Imaginary Atlas: Amazônia as the team takes us behind the scenes into their remarkable process of place-based fieldwork to imagine climate futures through immersive media, traditional knowledge and co-creation.

How do we imagine futures that do not erase the places they emerge from?

Drawing from The Imaginary Atlas, Amazônia, an ongoing project developed through fieldwork and collaborations in the Amazon rainforest, it reflects on how storytelling, interactive installations, and emerging technologies can be shaped by local knowledge systems and cultural practices.

Rather than proposing universal futures, the work focuses on building situated narratives through workshops, collective worldbuilding, and embodied experiences. The talk discusses how combining different forms of expression (from TEK to emerging tech) can open up new ways of prototyping futures that are more plural, grounded, and connected to lived realities.

This free virtual talk is open to everyone and registration is now open.

REGISTER FOR KEYNOTE

WORLDING Keynote at OpenDocLab Public Lecture Series presents

COLLECTIVE MAPPING OF
IMAGINARY ATLAS: AMAZÔNIA

Place-based storytelling as a climate research,
traditional knowledge & immersive art.

May 27, 2026, 12 noon - 1:30 PM ET

REGISTER FOR KEYNOTE

ANNOUNCING WORLDING 2026 COHORT

IMAGE: The four projects of WORLDING 2026 INCUBATOR

We received a record 128 applications for WORLDING, a new field emerging at the intersection of land-use planning, climate futures, non-fiction storytelling and game engines.

We are thrilled to announce the selected 4 teams that make up the WORLDING 2026 cohort. The four teams are Ahupua’a Living Lab (Hawai’i), Kuchema (Zimbabwe), Paru (Indonesia), Clouds are Massing (Canada). They will be joined by an inaugural MIT Exploration Team.

For more info about this years’ Cohort, read our announcement.

LEARN ABOUT COHORT

Introducing the 2026 WORLDING cohort.

WORLDING was founded at the Co-Creation Studio in 2021, and this 2026 iteration is funded generously by Agog: Immersive Media Institute, with the ongoing studio support of MacArthur Foundation and Just Films Ford Foundation. The Co-Creation Studio and Open Documentary Lab are housed at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) in the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

With generous support from:

Best described as a “book-film,” Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Book One, Ganymede is an e-book that comes to life as a cinema experience, designed to be taken in by one person at a time, at their own pace. Similar in ways to a graphic novel, it crosses the interiority of being a reader with the visceral presence of being a film watcher and presents a story world framed in three storytelling traditions: oral, written word, and cinematic. It also questions the role of authorship, believing that stories are a shared experience that exist in an in-between space.

Over the course of his personal filmmaking career, Bini has been developing a more conversational, everyday language of filmmaking. This has led him to his current project, Burden of Other People’s Dreams.

Showing clips from foundational films in his editing and personal work, Bini will discuss the steps that led to the language of his book film.

Moderated by Tabitha Jackson.

📅 Tuesday, April 7, 2 - 3:30 PM EST

📍 Join Zoom Link Below

ZOOM LINK

About the speakers

Joe Bini is a writer, director and editor, working in both fiction and non-fiction forms. In his long and renowned career as an innovative film editor, he has worked with Werner Herzog (for 19 years), Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold, Laura Poitras, Ross McElwee, Nick Broomfield and others. His editing is known for its creativity, originality and ability to elevate a film’s storytelling.

He brings lessons learned from absorbing and interpreting the cinematic languages of some of the greatest living filmmakers into his own work, which often experiments with combining word and image in unusual ways. He has written and directed two live cinema pieces and has an Emmy Award for nonfiction writing.

Tabitha Jackson is the Director of Film Forum — New York City’s sole autonomous nonprofit cinema, and for more than fifty years a defining institution of independent film culture in the United States. She arrived there after a thirty-year career moving through the independent media ecosystem: from public broadcasting in the UK at the BBC and Channel 4, to executive producing documentary film at Film4, to leading the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program for seven years, to becoming the first woman and person of color appointed Director of the Sundance Film Festival — where she stewarded two pandemic editions that required fundamentally reimagining what a festival could be and who it could be for. Those questions — of who cinema can be for, and how its animating values of free human expression and exchange can be cultivated, defended, and amplified — now shape her work at Film Forum. Jackson is an Emmy-winning director-producer, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and a research fellow at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab.

ZOOM LINK

We hope to see you at the talk.

Warm regards,
MIT Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio

With generous support from:

Dear WORLDING community,

We’re thrilled to share that WORLDING is back with an open call for an intensive virtual incubator in Spring 2026!

WORLDING ignites the co-creation of climate future stories that lead to real-world impact. Founded in 2021, this groundbreaking research and incubation initiative bridges storytelling in virtual environments with community wisdom and land-based placemaking. This year’s incubator is funded by Agog: The Immersive Media Institute, JustFilms Ford Foundation and MacArthur Foundation.

In previous years, we have held open calls, in-person workshops and hybrid iterations. This year, now in our fifth iteration, the incubator will be entirely virtual, designed for teams from anywhere in the world and with the aim to further support the intersection of documentary, social XR/game engine technology, community-based design, land-use planning, data visualization, and climate science.

We are inviting teams with climate future projects to apply to participate in the 2026 WORLDING incubator which will take place online May 13-27, 2026. Interdisciplinary teams applying would ideally include 3 members, with at least one storyteller and one place-maker.

APPLY NOW

The cohort will be carefully selected to include a diverse spectrum of disciplines, worldviews and approaches, from documentary and journalism, to games; from professionalized urban planning to community-based place-making, from AI-driven climate science to projects informed by Indigenous Epistemology, Afrofuturism and frameworks for disability justice.

For previous cohort composition and focus, please see the “projects and people” pages of 2022, 2023 and 2025.

KEY DATES

Application Window: Feb 23 – March 16 (11:59 pm ET)

Zoom Webinar about Open Call: March 3 at 8 am or 7 pm ET

Finalist Interviews: April 7–9

Selection Announcement: April 10

Incubator Program: May 13–27

LEARN ABOUT OPEN CALL at our WEBINAR

Please join us for an Zoom Webinar to ask your questions about the Open Call
on March 3 with two time slot options to accommodate world timezones,
MORNING 8 am ET and EVENING 7 pm ET.

REGISTER FOR WEBINAR

Please share this OPEN CALL by forwarding this email to colleagues and friends, or by reposting our LinkedIn post, Instagram Post.

WHAT IS THE INCUBATOR?
During the incubation workshop, the teams will have a unique opportunity to develop their projects with Co-Creation and ODL researchers, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and Agog team members, to explore how they use (or could use) realtime 3D technology to imagine, plan and co-create future worlds within real-life communities. The workshop will include a custom curated program specifically developed for the teams. While WORLDING is not a funding call, a stipend will be offered for the time commitment.

APPLICATION DETAILS

Submissions will be accepted until March 16, 2026 through this form. A long list of teams will be invited for brief Zoom interviews April 7-10, and invited teams are asked that all participants are present for the appointed time.

The final cohort of selected teams will be asked to participate over Zoom in the 7-day program over the course of May 13- 272026 with WORLDING days spread out across three weeks in blocks of 4-6 hours. 4-5 teams will be selected through a rigorous committee process in April and May. The workshop will make an effort to accommodate candidates from any time zone, but core programming will take place within working hours in ET/PT time.

The form below will ask for descriptions of the project itself, bios of team members and other visual tools such as decks, trailers and sample videos.

REQUIREMENTS

The co-creative teams should each consist of (at minimum) a storyteller/maker and a land-use/urban planner or placemaker. While having a team-member with XR technology experience may be helpful, it is not required for consideration.

The teams will need to make themselves available for

• A program design process that will include several ideation and planning sessions in April and May.

• 7 days of intensive programming from May 13-27, 2026. We ask that all team members be present with solid internet connection and a willingness to exchange ideas, develop projects and network. If there are connectivity issues, we are happy to work with teams to find curated solutions.

• One or two feedback sessions in June.

This workshop will best benefit projects and teams that are somewhere past the dreaming stage but not yet ready with a testable hypothesis. We also see it benefiting teams that already have a problem statement and have identified common principles for the project that include:

• the making of a (non-fiction) story or world-building and

• placemaking or land use decision-making that is community-based.

There is no required training, educational degree, or level of experience to be nominated.

INCLUSION POLICY

All are welcome to apply from anywhere in the world, including self-nominations which meet the minimum criteria. We encourage applications from teams that include: Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian individuals; individuals who are part of racial, ethnic, or religious minority groups; women; gender non-conforming individuals; LGBTQI+ individuals; individuals living with a disability; and other individuals whose authorship has historically been under-supported or underrepresented within the fields of documentary, planning, and technology.

AI POLICY

At WORLDING, we value the transparent, responsible and ethical deployment of artificial intelligence. In the application below, we ask that you declare your AI use for this application. And if AI is used for your projects themselves, kindly elaborate on how (name of models etc) in the project descriptions to the best of your ability.

APPLY NOW

RECENT WORLDING ARTICLES

Research is an important part of WORLDING. In the last few years, the organizing team has been producing new knowledge about these emergent communities of practice. Please check out recent two journal articles, one in Leonardo (about the WORLDING framework) and another in Journal of Environmental Media. (about ways of gathering online with care).

PLEASE SHARE THE OPEN CALL

Please share our open call with your networks by either forwarding this email, or resharing our LinkedIn post, Instagram Post, and/or using our Social Media Guide, click on button below.

USE OUR SOCIALS GUIDE

Thank you again for growing our community,

The whole WORLDING organizing team

With generous support from:

The AI + Documentary Working Group is part of a joint initiative between Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Doc Lab and WITNESS, a Human Rights Media Organization. Since 2018, we have been exploring the intersections between AI and Documentary / Non-Fiction, through research, publications, speaker series, presentations and advocacy, including submissions to the UN. We critically engage with technologists, documentarians, artists, policy makers, human right advocates and communities around the world to actively examine how AI is changing documentary practice, how AI affects creative integrity, the spread of misinformation, satire, and freedom of expression, and how documentarians can ethically engage with and cover the AI industrial complex.

This academic year, the Working Group is opening up monthly meetings to a wider informal membership. The meetings will include speakers, presentations, discussion groups, as well as developing open-sourced resources featuring a database with relevant readings, films, media projects, tools and organizations.

RSVP here to join Working Group

The 2025 meetings will take place on zoom on:

• Tuesday, October 28, 2-3:30 pm ET

• Tuesday, November 25, 2-3:30 pm ET

• Tuesday, December 9, 2-3:30 pm ET

With more dates to come in 2026.

Some questions we will explore together could include:

1. In what ways can documentary practices adapt to the challenges posed by AI, such as deepfakes, personalized and automated content generation, while maintaining and protecting journalistic integrity, public trust and human rights?

2. How can documentarians verify and contextualize AI-generated content without undermining creativity or freedom of expression?

3. How can documentary filmmakers ensure the authenticity and originality of their work in an era where AI-generated content is prevalent? And what are the ethical and practical strategies to mitigate AI slop in documentary and satirical media?

We are hoping you can share this invite with your community, and that you might join us! Again, please RSVP here, and you will receive zoom links to the meetings as well as occasional news from us.

Working Group co-leads,

Katerina Cizek, Co-Creation Studio

shirin anlen, WITNESS

Tabitha Jackson, ODL Fellow

Navid Khonsari, ODL Fellow

RSVP here to join Working Group

With generous support from:

A conversation between Syrian-Armenian-American storyteller and Hakawati founder Sona Tatoyan and Lebanese-Armenian-Canadian-American Entrepreneur and Moderna Co-Founder Noubar Afeyan, two visionary Armenian diaspora leaders bound by heritage and a shared mission to heal the world: one through art and the other through science. Hear how they turned their genocidal legacies and experience with oppressive regimes into triumphant acts of resilience, creativity, and healing. Learn how they innovate and iterate to create groundbreaking work in the arts and sciences. How does storytelling heal societal wounds? Can scientific leaps mirror artistic epiphanies and vice versa? How do their legacies inform their work and mission? What advice do they have for scientists and artists working in today’s climate? They will discuss these questions and more.

Moderated by Professor Lerna Ekmekcioglu.

📅 Friday, October 24, 6 - 7:30 PM

📍 MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Lee Family Exchange Space, Cambridge, MA 02142

This event is generously supported by the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology and Radius

RSVP HERE

Please note that tickets are now available on Eventbrite.

About the speakers

Dr. Noubar Afeyan is an entrepreneur, inventor, and founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a company that creates bioplatform companies to transform human health and sustainability. He is co-founder and chairman of the board of Moderna, the pioneering messenger RNA company.

Afeyan, who fled Lebanon’s civil war as a teen before pioneering biotech breakthroughs like Moderna’s COVID vaccine that revolutionized global health, embodies resilient innovation. Co-founder of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, he’s dedicated to empowering survivors worldwide through philanthropy and venture creation. An entrepreneur and biochemical engineer, Dr. Afeyan holds more than 100 patents and has co-founded more than 70 life science and technology startups during his 36-year career. He completed his doctoral work in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987. He was a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management from 2000 to 2016, a lecturer at Harvard Business School until 2020, and he currently serves as a member of the MIT Corporation. He teaches and speaks around the world on topics ranging from entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic development to biological engineering, new medicines, and renewable energy. In 2022, Noubar was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Sona Tatoyan, a Syrian-Armenian-American actor, writer, producer, and founder of Hakawati, —an NGO bridging the U.S. and Armenia through transformative narratives — creates transformative storytelling to heal trauma. Co-created with two time Obie-winning director Jared Mezzocchi and produced by Bill Pullman and Afeyan, her acclaimed multimedia play AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf), which she wrote and stars in, draws on meditation and psychedelic insights, Karagöz puppets, and ancient tales like One Thousand and One Nights to shatter cycles of trauma.

Prior stage credits include world premieres at Yale Repertory Theatre, The Goodman Theatre, and American Conservatory Theatre. She starred in The Journey, the first American indie film shot in Armenia (Audience Award, Milan Film Festival, 2002). Her screenplay The First Full Moon was selected for Sundance/RAWI fellowship (2011) and Dubai Film Connection (2012). Tatoyan co-created the 1001 Nights Experience with Isaac Sabu, an iterative peace-building project celebrating Middle Eastern storytelling and culture.

A 2024-26 Georgetown Global Politics and Performance Lab Fellow, she has spoken at Harvard, University of Michigan, and Berlin’s Pergamon Museum on trauma, liberation and reconciliation and has served as the Rudolf Arnheim Guest Artist Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Lerna Ekmekcioglu is a historian of the modern Middle East with a focus on the late Ottoman Empire, post-genocide Turkey, and minority politics. Her research explores how Armenians—particularly women—navigated survival and belonging after empire and mass violence. She is the author of Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey and co-author of Feminism in Armenian, a historical archive of Armenian feminist thought from the 1860s to 1960s. Her teaching includes courses on genocide and its aftermath, women and gender in the Middle East, and the global history of abortion. Prof. Ekmekcioglu is the winner of the 2016 Levitan Teaching Award in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and organizes the Bi-annual McMillan-Stewart Lecture Series on women in the developing world.

RSVP HERE

We hope to see you at the talk.

Warm regards,
MIT Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio

With generous support from:

We are thrilled to join DUSP under the leadership of Professor Ceasar McDowell. In DUSP, our focus will still be documentary and emerging technologies, but we will also have the opportunity to further explore the relationship between narrative and place through projects such as Worlding and Layers of Place.

We have a lot in the pipeline this fall, ranging from a newly expanded AI and Documentary Working Group to a new research project exploring public libraries as sites of distribution, exhibition and access to Extended Reality (XR) experiences and tools. We continue to address the world’s most pressing problems from climate to independent and public fact-based media ecosystems with new documentary forms and co-creative practices. In the words of the late Jane Goodall, “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

New 2025 - 2026 Open Documentary Lab Fellows

We are thrilled to welcome five new fellows this semester by way of our partnerships with Onassis ONX Studio, Royal Shakespeare Company and through our Co-Creation Studio. They represent a range of disciplines including documentary, theater, games and art.

May Abdalla, an Onassis ONX Fellow, is a twice Emmy-nominated director and artist recognized for her groundbreaking work that merges physical experience, technology, and storytelling. Her projects offer poetic insight, tackling contemporary issues through a mixture of documentary, game-design and speculative fiction. She co-founded the award-winning studio Anagram in the UK in 2013 to experiment with modes of user interactivity in non-fiction storytelling. Anagram’s Playing With Reality has received two Venice Lions the Grand Jury Award for Best VR and the Immersive Achievement Award in 2024. At MIT Open Doc Lab, she will work on Amorphous, a transformative multiplayer experience that redefines how we inhabit our bodies.

Asha Easton, a Royal Shakespeare Company Fellow, is a lead on Innovate UK’s Immersive Tech Network, helping guide organisations in the XR sector looking for funding for developing innovative products related to XR. She shares insights into the market and uses her network to help organisations create powerful connections. She supports organisations involved in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Film/TV, Production & post-production, VFX & Animation, Gaming, 5G, Hardware and Wearables. She is passionate about helping to promote diversity & inclusion in the XR space and is a co-founder of the XR Diversity Initiative, involved in working groups for XRAccess, and a member of Women in Immersive Tech. At MIT Open Doc Lab, she will research business models, sustainability and longevity in the XR industry.

Navid Khonsari, an MIT Co-Creation Studio Fellow, is a co-founder of iNK Stories. Khonsari helped shape the cinematic style of Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, and Resident Evil, and has pioneered award-winning titles like 1979 Revolution: Black Friday and HERO. His latest project, Lili—a hybrid screenlife video game + live-action film now in production—uses AI on multiple fronts to push the boundaries of interactive storytelling. After premiering at Cannes as the first video game in competition, Lili continues to redefine how technology, cinema, and games collide. His research investigates how artificial intelligence can be reimagined as a collaborator and co-author in storytelling, shifting the boundaries of authorship, agency, and ethics in narrative creation.

Pei-Ying Lin, a Royal Shakespeare Company Fellow, is an artist/designer from Taiwan and is currently based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. She holds a MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, UK and a BSc in Life Science from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She will investigate how we perceive and classify AI, as well as observe how researchers attune their bodies and senses to protocols, and how they interpret invisible entities (like microorganisms) through indirect observation.

Neda Moridpour (she/they), a Royal Shakespeare Company Fellow, is a Kurdish-Iranian cultural futurist, artist, and organizer whose research examines cycles of violence that lead to displacement, discrimination, and systemic inequities. Through socially engaged art and community-based participatory research, they create collaborative spaces grounded in mutual care, community building, and the visualization of future world-building. Moridpour is a Professor of the Practice at the SMFA and Tisch College at Tufts University. Their fellowship will focus on an interactive and multi-platform art project, initiated by Hamdel Futurist Collaborative, which reimagins the archive not as a static repository, but as a living, participatory space of collective care, solidarity, and shared memory.

These five fellows will be in fellowship with our four returning fellows. You can learn more about them here!

Invite to Join Monthly AI+Documentary Working Group

The AI + Documentary Working Group is part of a joint initiative between Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Doc Lab and WITNESS, a Human Rights Media Organization. Since 2018, we have been exploring the intersections between AI and Documentary / Non-Fiction, through research, publications, speaker series, presentations and advocacy, including submissions to the UN. We critically engage with technologists, documentarians, artists, policy makers, human right advocates and communities around the world to actively examine how AI is changing documentary practice, how AI affects creative integrity, the spread of misinformation, satire, and freedom of expression, and how documentarians can ethically engage with and cover the AI industrial complex.

This academic year, the Working Group is opening up monthly meetings to a wider informal membership. The meetings will include speakers, presentations, discussion groups, as well as developing open-sourced resources featuring a database with relevant readings, films, media projects, tools and organizations.

RSVP here to join Working Group

The 2025 meetings will take place on zoom on:

• Tuesday October 28, 2-3:30 pm ET

• Tuesday November 25, 2-3:30 pm ET

• Tuesday December 9, 2-3:30 pm ET

With more dates to come in 2026.

Some questions we will explore together could include:

1. In what ways can documentary practices adapt to the challenges posed by AI, such as deepfakes, personalized and automated content generation, while maintaining and protecting journalistic integrity, public trust and human rights?

2. How can documentarians verify and contextualize AI-generated content without undermining creativity or freedom of expression?

3. How can documentary filmmakers ensure the authenticity and originality of their work in an era where AI-generated content is prevalent? And what are the ethical and practical strategies to mitigate AI slop in documentary and satirical media?

We are hoping you can share this invite with your community, and that you might join us! Again, please RSVP here, and you will receive zoom links to the meetings as well as occasional news from us.

Working Group co-leads,

Katerina Cizek, Co-Creation Studio

shirin anlen, WITNESS

Tabitha Jackson, ODL Fellow

Navid Khonsari, ODL Fellow

RSVP here to join Working Group

The Synthesis: A Monthly Column in Documentary Magazine

The Synthesis continues to do important work that dives into the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and documentary practice. Co-authors Kat Cizek and shirin anlen synthesize the latest intelligence on synthetic media and AI tools—alongside their implications for nonfiction mediamaking. The Synthesis is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Co-Creation Studio at MIT’s Open Doc Lab and WITNESS.

Read the latest from our monthly column: an interview with Raoul Peck reflecting on deploying AI-generated imagery to illuminate Orwell’s insights about linguistic manipulation:

• Raoul Peck on Using AI to Critique Authoritarianism in ‘Orwell: 2+2=5’

Libraries as hubs for XR distribution, exhibition and creation

As longstanding centers for knowledge exchange, civic engagement, and public access to knowledge, libraries offer a unique infrastructure for fostering immersive storytelling outside of corporate pipelines. Libraries are everywhere—from small rural towns to big cities, on the coasts and in the prairies of middle America. They are open to all and an important equalizer of knowledge. They have deep roots in their communities with long-term relationships with community centers and schools.

We are collaborating with Cambridge Public Library, LA Public Library as well as Stanford Public library to explore the potential role of libraries in commissioning, distributing, and expanding access to immersive experiences.

This initiative is funded by Agog: The Immersive Media Institute.

Warm regards,
MIT Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio

With generous support from:

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