Presenter Bios

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  Emilie Baltz

  Emilie Baltz is an innovation director and experiential artist who creates multi-sensory experiences one lick, suck, bite and sniff at a time. Best known for her work in using food as a medium (and metaphor) for designing experience, she works at the intersection of hospitality, performance, industrial design and technology.

  She is an award-winning artist, author and public speaker with appearances at TEDx, DLD, PSFK Conference, Ignite Conference, Creative Mornings, TODAY Show, NBC, Wall Street Journal, D-CRIT, and more. Emilie is based in New York City and is part of the NEW LAB for emerging technologies & human behavior, as well as a founding member of NEW INC, the first museum led incubator for art, design & technology hosted at the New Museum. She is also part of the founding faculty of the School of Visual Arts Products of Design MFA program, and the founder of the first Food Design Studio at Pratt Institute.

  Emilie is the author of the award-winning “L.O.V.E FOODBOOK”, recipient of Best First Cookbook in the World at the Prix Gourmand held annually in the Louvre, Paris; as well as the nationally featured cookbook, “Junk Foodie: 51 Delicious Recipes for the Lowbrow Gourmand”.

  She is a Sundance Lab New Frontiers Fellow and recipient of the 2018 IDFA DocLab Best Immersive Non-Fiction Award for EAT TECH KITCHEN, a playful performance that critiques human behavior through the mash-up of food, technology and absurdity.

• Ann Hermes

  Ann Hermes is a Brooklyn and Boston-based photojournalist and visual storyteller with a flair for the nostalgic. Her personal work explores the roles that often overlooked, and sometimes outdated, institutions and people play in our history and culture.

  She has worked in a variety of logistically challenging situations on national and international assignments over 15 years as a staff photographer for The Christian Science Monitor and other national and regional news outlets. This work ranged from breaking visual news coverage of the Arab Spring in Egypt to in-depth stories following Syrian refugees in Eastern Europe. Her stories have also been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic.

  After years of experience in news photography, she is using her documentary expertise to create a visual exploration of the current critical era in journalism and explore the potential harm that the loss of local newsrooms would bring to our democracy.

• Pat Kane

  Pat Kane is a visual storyteller based in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, on the traditional land of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation.

  He takes a documentary approach to stories about life in Northern Canada, with a special focus on issues important to Indigenous people, including the relationship between land and identity.

  Pat is a National Geographic Explorer, and a former mentee of the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. His work has been published by National Geographic, The New York Times, World Press Photo, The Atlantic, The Globe and Mail, and other media worldwide.

  Pat is of Irish-Canadian and Algonquin Anishinaabe ancestry, and is a member of the Timiskaming First Nation.

  He’s part of the photo collectives Indigenous Photograph and Boreal Collective.

• Edwin Pagán

  Edwin Pagán is a Bronx-based multidisciplinary artist whose work centers around photography, filmmaking, sound and graphic design. Pagán was introduced to the arts at age 10 at the Hoe Avenue Boys & Girls Club, which led to his extensive careers in photography and cinematography. He is noted as one of the premiere visual artists from the Bronx, and his body of work is an intimate and humane look at the cultural idiosyncrasies of inner-city communities from an “insider’s point-of-view.”

  In 2011, he co-founded Seis del Sur, a photo collective of six photojournalism and documentary photographers who have documented the South Bronx for over four decades. A life-long fan of horror, in 2008 he founded LATIN HORROR (latinhorror.com), an online portal that promotes Latin influenced horror. As a result, he is widely credited with establishing a distinct and valid genre in the film industry.

  More recently, Pagán has harnessed his creative skills and ventured into the virtual- and augmented-reality space to create interactive multimedia installations that take as a point of departure the same themes he’s explored in his photographic work.
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  Smita Sharma

  Smita Sharma is a Delhi based photojournalist who has documented social justice, sexual crimes, human trafficking, and environmental issues in the Global South through long-form visual narratives. Smita is a TED fellow, TED Speaker, and an IWMF reporting fellow. For “Stolen Lives”, her in-depth work documenting sex trafficking in India and Bangladesh for National Geographic Magazine, she received the Amnesty International Media Award and the Fetisov Journalism Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting. Her work has been published in National Geographic Magazine, The Nature Conservancy, WSJ, TIME, BBC World, Human Rights Watch, and Die Zeit, amongst many others, and exhibited globally including at the UN Headquarters in New York. Smita is actively engaged in public speaking, victim advocacy, and international public education. Her book We Cry In Silence, documenting cross-border trafficking of underage girls in South Asia (FotoEvidence), received the Award of Excellence at POY International and the 2023 Lucie Photo Book Prize in the Independent Category.

  Photo credit: Dinesh Khanna