cari ann shim sham* is a NYC-based choreographer, artist, educator, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of dance, technology, healing, art, and nature. Her practice explores improvisation, accessibility, collective healing, and ethical engagement with emerging technologies through experimental scores, participatory performance, generative media, and community-centered research.
She is the creator of dance prompts, an open-source, community-developed AI choreographer intentionally biased toward inclusive movement practices. She previously co-developed an equity-driven AI curator for the Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (MOWNA), which she co-founded in 2020. MOWNA is an online digital museum that has exhibited 524 artists from 68 countries and hosts an ongoing Biennial, with 14 exhibitions to date.
Her artistic work spans interactive performance, generative movement as healing, ritual and magic, self-portraiture, inflatable sculpture as empathy generators, and the performance of the body’s energetic field—both in physical space and on the blockchain. Her live work centers on participatory scores and prompts that gather people together, using core images to trigger somatic movement and resolution. Her generative works are created for meditative gazing and interactive play and are exhibited, collected, and curated internationally.
cari ann’s animated and cinematic works have received multiple awards and screened globally, with distribution through iTunes, Amazon, Shorts International, and inclusion in the Routledge Performance Archive. She was the first video artist to redesign Robert Rauschenberg’s Shiner for Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset/Reset, and her video art has toured internationally. She also performs live coding and live video art mapping, recently featured in Obsessed with Light, the documentary on Loïe Fuller.
A certified Family and Systemic Constellation Therapist, she developed Morphic Embodiment, a somatic practice using image resolution through movement for healing, and is researching wild mushroom tinctures for cancer support.
cari ann is a Full Arts Professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she has led the Dance & Technology program and initiated Ethics of Big Tech and Social Media: Ethnotechnics for NYU’s global campuses. She spends her free time in the woods hunting edible mushrooms and communing with nature.
cari ann shim shmm* in the metaverse
Bitch Co. performs Bubble Wrap for the Cirque du Soleil Opening Party for “O” at the Belagio, Las Vegas, 1999