Diane Gromala is the Canada Research Chair in Computational Technologies for Transforming Pain and a Professor in SFU's (Simon Fraser University's) School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Her research works at the confluence of computer science, media art and design, and is focused on the cultural, visceral, and embodied implications of digital technologies, particularly in the realm of chronic pain.
Gromala was one of the artists in the Art & Virtual Environments residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts from 1991-1993, and has been pursuing VR and other ways of transforming bodily experience (such as biomorphic typography; interactive books made of meat; and speculative wearables impregnated with things she grows, accompanied by Edgar and Hector, her crows) since that time.
Since 1990, Gromala has co-created 7 interdisciplinary (art + science + cultural theory) grad and undergrad curricula at UTexas, UW Seattle, Georgia Tech, Waikato University & Wanganui Polytechnic (New Zealand) and SIAT.
People might want to talk to me about pain, perceptual and embodied transformation, pharmakon, working with physicians and health scientists, art+science, and/or ontological shenanigans. Or what it's like to be older than dirt, to misspend one's youth in the Silicon Valley, or to conduct ethnographic field studies of venture capitalists on the down-lo.