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 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 2018, Anezka traveled to India 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 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 multi-player virtual reality experience that teaches middle school and college students how to rebuild an oyster reef (2019). She is currently doing usability testing of this project in the Cognitive Sciences department at IIT Gandhinagar, India.
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:
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)
Research Interests:
Immersive New Media, Education and Technology, Ecological and Social Justice, Affordable Housing.