Faculty

Profile

Anezka Sebek, Ph.D. is teaching Sustainable Design in Engineering with Human Factors at IIT Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India (January to May 2024). She studied Hindi at The American Institute of Indian Studies, Jaipur (September – May 2023). Before her Emeritus Professor transition (June 2021), she designed curricula in BFA/MFA Design and Technology Programs in virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies, as well as teaching in studio and thesis courses. Her extensive career in the film industry includes projects for television, advertising, documentaries, and feature films. She was best known as visual effects and computer animation producer for technologically complex projects that combined live-action with digital effects. She has written, produced, and directed music videos, narrative shorts, and documentaries. Ms. Sebek served on juries for Association for Computing Machinery Siggraph Electronic and Animation Theater and Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria). She was invited to speak at the Post-City Ars Electronica Festival Expanded Animation Panel (2015) about the changing field of new media and animation technologies. Her talk inspired an article in Expanded Animation, Mapping An Unlimited Landscape, entitled “Now You Touch It, Now You Don’t” (October 2019).  She curated the New School Nth Degree series events, Immersive Storytelling Symposium (February 2017). Her Ph.D. in Sociology (2016) dissertation, Family Homelessness in the Small City (2016), is an ethnographic qualitative method study of the social strata and bureaucracies that control the lack of affordable housing and living-wage jobs in post-industrial Northeast American cities. In January of 2020, Anezka was a Scholar-in-Residence at IIT Gandhinagar, Palaj, Gujarat, India. In January 2018, Anezka first traveled to  Institution of Technology (IIT) at the Gandhinagar with 28 New School students. For two weeks, students developed possible answers to the wicked problems of how to Design for a Billion. In her Ed Tech and Design Thinking studio, she worked with faculty and New School and middle school students to create extended reality (VR/AR/MR) projects that use systems thinking to understand biological solutions to pollution and the effects of climate change. With her colleague, Tammy Walters, she won a Verizon 5G Challenge Grant to create a multi-player virtual reality experience that teaches middle school and college students how to rebuild an oyster reef (2019-2020). She has done work with The Pandemic Worlds Seminar at The India-China Institute in Spring 2021 where she contributed as a fellow to study the effects of the Pandemic on three populations in Mumbai, Gujarat, and Kingston, New York. 

Degrees Held

Ph.D. Sociology - The New School for Social Research

MA Media Studies-The New School for Public Engagement

BFA in Spanish Literature and Sociology-Drew University, Madison, New Jersey

Beginner level Hindi Language Studies at The American Institute of Indian Studies

Professional Affiliation

Association for Computing Machinery

American Sociological Association

Recent Publications

Immersion in the Workplace: a unique model for students to engage in real-world service design, with John Jones. Cuaderno 2019.

Expanded Animation: The Anthology: Mapping an Unlimited Landscape, Chapter: Now You See it, Now You Don't, Experiments in Virtual Interfaces. 2019

Dissertation: "Family Homelessness in the Small City." (2016)

Performances and Appearances

Immersive Storytelling in AR/VR Cognitive Science and Design Workshops, IIT Gandhinar, Gujarat, India

Ars Electronica 2015 Expanded Animation: http://www.expandedanimation.com/?page_id=843

Immersive Storytelling Symposium http://immersive.parsons.edu/

Verizon 5G NYC Media Lab Ed Tech Challenge 

Pandemic Worlds Seminar 

Research Interests

Immersive New Media, Education and Technology, Ecological and Social Justice, Affordable Housing. 

Awards And Honors

Verizon 5G Challenge Grant 2019-2020

Portfolio

Immersive Media

Ed Tech and Design Thinking 2016-19

The Story of an Oyster Reef

Reimagining Orozco 2011