Profile:
Anezka Sebek designs curricula in BFA/MFA Design and Technology Programs in virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies, as well as teaching in studio and thesis courses. Before teaching full-time, 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 methods 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 2018, Anezka traveled to India Institution of Technology (IIT) at the Gandhinagar with 28 New School. 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 works 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 virtual simulation of building an under water Oyster Reef (2019).
Degrees Held:
MA Media Studies-The New School for Public Engagement
Ph.D. Sociology - The New School for Social Research
Professional Affiliations:
Association for Computing Machinery
American Sociological Association
Recent Publications:
Dissertation: "Family Homelessness in the Small City." (2016)
Research Interests:
Urban Sociology, VR/AR/MR, 360 Cinematic VR, New Media, Digital and Electronic Technologies, Design and Academic research, film/video/photography, ecological and social justice, affordable housing, inequality, working-poor, post-industrial USA, homeless families.