Who’s Who

Program Directors

Abraham Burickson

Abraham Burickson, Co-Founder of Odyssey Works and Co-Director of the Experience Design Certificate Program, has spent more than two decades exploring the relationship between what we make and how it is experienced. Trained in architecture at Cornell University and in poetry and playwriting at the Michener Center for Writers, he has also studied the transformative power of designed experience with the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and with countless artists, designers, and students through Odyssey Works. He is also the founder of The Long Architecture Project, which rethinks architectural practice from the perspective of Experience Design. He has won prizes, lectured and taught widely, given a TEDxtalk, and was once hired by German television to kidnap an American skateboarding champion. His book on Experience Design is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2023.

Ayden LeRoux

Ayden LeRoux is the Assistant Director of Odyssey Works and Co-Founder of the Experience Design Certificate Program. As an artist and writer, her work aims to cultivate intimacy and urgency between the artist and audience. An advocate of interdisciplinary and genre-defying creative work, she holds art and writing degrees with extraordinarily long titles from NYU and UCSD. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have been published widely, and her installations, performance, and photography, have been exhibited internationally. When she was eight, she told her parents she wanted to dress up as a painter for Halloween. Thinking she meant house painter rather than fine art painter, they unwittingly opened a decades-long existential inquiry about the intersection of domestic space and creative practice.

Guest Critics & Visiting Artists

Eric Clough is a visionary architect and designer known for his innovative approach to space and living environments. Described by The New York Times as “his ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino”, Clough has left an indelible mark on the world of architecture and design.
In 2001, Clough founded 212box, a cutting-edge architecture and design firm that has redefined the boundaries of creativity. The firm's headquarters in Manhattan's Financial District, situated near the World Trade Center and 9/11 Memorial site, serves as a hub for their multidisciplinary endeavors. 212box specializes in diverse fields including architecture, real estate, product design, film, and graphic design.
(THIS IS A PLACEHOLDER!)

Lea Redmond reveals the extraordinary hiding in the ordinary: a saltshaker, a penny, hand gestures, clouds. Lea creates books, toys, games and small adventures that invite humans of all ages to be curious, playful, and kind. Visit Lea’s world of wonder at LeaRedmond.com.

Creator of ‘Say Something Bunny’
Alison S. M. Kobayashi is an award winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid work mixes documentary and fiction through video, performance, installation, interactive and illustration. Her performance Say Something Bunny! received critical acclaim heralded as "The best new theater experience in town" by Vogue, was a NYTimes critics’ pick, was listed in Time Out’s 2017 top ten productions and BOMB’s Best of Performance list in 2018. Kobayashi has received nominations for a 2018 Drama Desk award and 2019 United Solo Special Award and is the recipient of the 2006 TSV Artistic Vision Award. Her video work has been exhibited internationally at both museums, performance and film festivals including; Bilbao International Film Festival, The Western Front (Vancouver), The Power Plant (Toronto) and Pace Digital Gallery (NYC) and Les Subsistances (Lyon). She was a fellow at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar. Since 2012 she’s been producing Special Projects at UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art. There she collaborated on expansive documentary projects like Living Los Sures which New York Film Festival described as “one of the most comprehensive, incredible and in-depth interactive projects that we at the film society have ever seen” and was founding art director of the documentary journal, World Records. Kobayashi grew up in Mississauga, Ontario and is currently based in Toronto and New York City.

Tassos Stevens is one of Coney, a charity with a mission of making all kinds of play to spark change, following principles of adventure, curiosity, and loveliness. Recent projects range from The Golden Key, a one-day event across the City of London for over 35,000 people, to Evergreen, an adventure gift commissioned bespoke for one person, as well as live events online via Coney’s Pop-Up Playhouse.

Founder of Cooper Hewitt Interactive Media Lab
Rachel Eve Ginsberg has spent the past decade as a consultant and experience designer exploring the relationship between information systems, interaction design and sensemaking. As the founding director of the Interaction Lab at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Rachel built an interdisciplinary program focused on audience experience. Prior to her work with the Smithsonian, Rachel led strategy and partnerships for the Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab. As an artist, Rachel pursues projects across a range of media exploring self-discovery, catharsis, and building compassion for self and others. Her work has been programmed at the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier, and International Documentary Festival Amsterdam’s Doc Lab.

Risa Puno is a NYC-based sculpture and installation artist who uses interactivity and play to understand how we relate to one another. She has exhibited with many museums and organizations in the US and internationally. In 2019, she was selected by Creative Time for their inaugural Open Call award and was named FIGMENT’s first-ever Interactive Artist of the Year. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, ProPublica, The Boston Globe. Puno grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and she studied art and medicine at Brown University and earned her MFA from New York University.

Third Rail Projects Co-Artistic Director
Zach Morris (he/him/his) is a director, choreographer and Co-Artistic Director of the internationally acclaimed Third Rail Projects. Zach is co-creator of the immersive theater hits Then She Fell, The Grand Paradise, Sweet & Lucky with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and Ghost Light at Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow Theater, among others. Zach's work includes theater, dance, site-specific performance, multimedia installation art/environments, and he is particularly interested in how all of these can intersect with audience-centered experiential gatherings. Zach has been honored with numerous awards, including a Chita Rivera award, two BESSIE awards; projects he has collaborated on have garnered a Drama Desk Nomination, a Peabody Award, and an Emmy Award. His work has been presented nationally and internationally with the support of numerous grants, commissions, and residencies, and he has had the pleasure of teaching, mentoring, and creating new platforms to support the work of artists at home and abroad. Zach holds a BFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University.