Sundance Institute's Story Forum: Exploring Art and Innovation is a space to learn, collaborate, and join the conversation; inviting thoughtful dialogue about the artist-first tools and technologies supporting visual storytelling today.


Director Valerie Veatch returns with her third film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in competition with her new documentary, Ghost in the Machine. The provocative feature exposes the buried history of artificial intelligence and entrenched structures of power that have shaped the technology. In this special three-hour session, Veatch will present a deep-dive into the making of her documentary as well as the technology’s implications with regards to race, gender, data, labor, the climate, and more. Veatch will lead a series of three panel discussions with nine experts who appear in her film. These exclusive conversations will offer insight into finding and shaping your story with your documentary participants, and prove essential for those interested in the systems surrounding the development of AI.


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Samuel Black
Documentary Filmmaker, More Perfect Union
Samuel Black is a documentary filmmaker at More Perfect Union, a nonprofit newsroom that covers economic and political issues across the country. He has directed, produced, and reported documentaries for PBS Frontline, Al Jazeera English, Showtime, HBO, Universal, A&E IndieFilms, Vice, and This American Life, and his work has received awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Producers Guild, the NIHCM Foundation, the Walter Cronkite Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Awards, and the News & Documentary Emmys. more...
Alix Dunn
CEO, The Maybe
Alix Dunn is a trusted expert and advisor who has worked at the intersection of technology and society for over 15 years. She is the founder and CEO of The Maybe, a critical consultancy, collective, and media studio that challenges the power and politics of tech. Alix is also the host of the weekly COMPUTER SAYS MAYBE podcast, a senior advisor to AI Now, and serves on the boards of the strategic litigation firm Foxglove and the radical research network RealML. Previously, she served as a trustee of the Ada Lovelace Institute for AI & Society. Alix and her team at The Maybe have partnered with organizations including the Ford Foundation, Amnesty International, Open Society Foundations, International Fund for Public Interest Media, System, Human Rights Watch, DeepMind, and many others. more...
Johnathan Flowers
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge
Johnathan Flowers is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Northridge. His primary research areas include African American intellectual history and philosophy, Japanese Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Technology. Flowers also works in the areas of Feminist Philosophy and affect theory, with a specific focus on the affective organization of identity. more...
Krystal Kauffman
Data Worker and Researcher, Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute
Krystal is a data worker and research fellow with DAIR, focused on the human labor that underpins AI systems and the ethical questions that surround them. Her work examines the often-invisible individuals who power the AI supply chain - data annotators, content moderators, and other platform-based workers - and the broader systems that shape their working conditions. more...
Richard Mathenge
Co-founder, Techworker Community Africa; Co-founder, African Content Moderators’ Union
Richard Mathenge is a former team lead in one of the well known AI organizations in Kenya. He is credited in fighting for the rights and better working conditions for Tech workers and content moderators through better regulations, workable mechanisms and policy framework. more...
Milagros Miceli
Research Lead, Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute; Founder, Data Workers' Inquiry
Dr. Milagros Miceli is a leading researcher and critical voice in the field of artificial intelligence. She currently serves as Research Lead at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute, Director of the Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics research group at the Weizenbaum Institute, and lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin. Her research focuses on the social, political, and ethical dimensions of AI, with particular attention to the invisible labor and power asymmetries embedded in the creation of machine learning datasets. more...
Thema Monroe-White
Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Policy, George Mason University
Thema (Tay-mah) Monroe-White is an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. She is particularly concerned with understanding the pathways to achieving social and economic empowerment for minoritized groups via AI education, and emancipatory data science, a justice-centered approach to computational and quantitative inquiry that challenges algorithmic biases, advances racial equity, and reimagines how data and AI can serve marginalized communities. She investigates the intersections of bias mitigation, critical computational methods, and racial equity across science and technology education. more...
Mophat Okinyi
Co-founder and CEO, Techworker Community Africa
Mophat Okinyi is an AI and human rights activist, labor organizer, and former content moderator based in Kenya. He is the Founder and CEO of Techworker Community Africa and a leading voice organizing data and platform workers across the Global South. Mophat is one of the Kenyan workers who helped train large language models, including ChatGPT, to reduce harmful and toxic content, giving him firsthand insight into the hidden human labor behind AI. more...
Tiera Tanksley
Senior Researcher; Founder, Race, Abolition and Artificial Intelligence Program
Dr. Tiera Tanksley is a Senior Researcher whose work examines the socioemotional, mental health and academic impacts of digital and artificially intelligent technologies on Black youth. Her work examines anti-Blackness as the “default setting” of schools and school-based technologies, including GenAI chatbots, facial recognition systems, weapons detection systems, and more. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist, and rewrite algorithmically biased technologies to produce more-just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color across the diaspora. more...
Valerie Veatch
Moderator | Director, GHOST IN THE MACHINE
Hailing from London by way of New York by way of Seattle, Valere Veatch is an acclaimed independent documentary filmmaker. Veatch is a writer, director, and producer of documentaries "Me @ The Zoo" (HBO), "Love Child" (HBO). Veatch is a graduate of the New School for Social Research with a degree in Culture and Media Studies. Her award-winning work deals with the intersection of technology and society. more...

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