AI Climate Justice Lab

Using AI Technology to Transform Housing, Health, and Human Thriving for a Sustainable Future.

Led by Amelia Winger-Bearskin

The AI Climate Justice Lab collaborates with a diverse international cohort to uncover hidden patterns in healthcare technology and leverage AI to address global homelessness, housing loss, and promote human thriving.

Selected AI Climate Lab Activities from 2021-2024

  • A partner of Community Solutions in the movement to end Homelessness, working with AI solutions for housing loss and homelessness.

  • Climate Lounge: A Vibe Shift for your Day, a live stream featuring climate conversations from scientists, researchers, artists, and musicians.

  • Wampum.Codes podcast Season 2 launch, featuring Indigenous leaders using technology in ways to make positive changes in their communities

  • Sounding community response sessions about Indigenous antecedent technologies as a roadmap to sustainable computing

  • Wampum.Codes Value-Based Dependencies in Software + AI Development workshops with PIT Alumni Network

  • Curation of Talk to Me About Water with a cohort of Indigenous technologists creating experiences for DWeb Camp 2022 and Unfinished Live 2022

  • Shy Springs: A conversation about water - in collaboration with museums and art institutions open to the public, Online RPGs, and in-Person Performance Workshops.

  • Our 2022 Decentralized Listening Series with Art Museums, Institutions, and Artists around what the cultural backend could be that would empower co-creation, sovereignty, support, community coalitions, and sustainability using decentralized technologies.

  • Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an affiliate faculty with the UF Water Institute, Indigenous Studies Department, UF’s Intelligent Clinical Care Center (IC3), and the Center for Arts Migration and Entrepreneurship (CAME)

  • Collaborating on a project with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence with Dr. Zorana Pringle on AI Art and Public Health and art museums’ role in public health.

  • Member of the IEEE Planet Positive Working Group, Planet Positive 2030 is an initiative supported by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) that brings together
    a diverse global, open community of experts to chart a path for all people to achieve a flourishing future for 2030 and beyond.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Founder

About
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is also the founder of the AI Climate Justice Lab, the Talk To Me About Water Collective, and the Stupid Hackathon.

In 2023-2024, she created the Virtual Reality experience for the feature film Fancy Dance. Directed and produced by Erica Tremblay, a fellow Seneca-Cayuga woman and friend, the film was the first Cayuga Language Feature Film and the first to be filmed on Amelia and Erica’s reservation in Grove, Oklahoma. The film stars Lily Gladstone, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, has won numerous awards, is currently in theaters, and is streaming on Apple. She also created a short experimental film, I WOULD LIKE TO BE MIDNIGHT / I WOULD LIKE TO BE SKY, which premiered at film festivals including ImagineNATIVE, DeadCenter Film, Maoriland, and is on display at the Columbus Museum of Art and the NVIDIA GTC Art Gallery.

In 2022 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Award as part of the Sundance AOP Fellowship cohort for her project CLOUD WORLD / SKYWORLD which was part of The Whitney’s Sunrise/Sunset series.

In 2021, she was a fellow at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence, which was made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF).

In 2020 she founded Wampum Codes, an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation, while a Mozilla Fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio.

In 2019 she was a delegate at the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion for His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama, at his World Headquarters in Dharmsala, India. 

In 2018 she was awarded the 100k Alternative Realities Prize for her Virtual Reality Project: Your Hands Are Feet from Engadget and Verizon Media. This was also the year that nonprofit IDEA New Rochelle won the $1 Million Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge for their VR/AR Citizen toolkit to help the community co-design their city.

In years prior:

Her video art was selected as a part of Storytelling : La biennale d’art contemporain autochtone, 2e édition (Art Biennale of Contemporary Native Art) at Art Mur (Montreal, Canada). She has been a featured artist at numerous international performance art festivals since 2008 in cities not limited to: Beijing, China, Manila, Philippines, Seoul, South Korea, Sao Paulo, Brazil, New York, NY, and Washington, DC. She presented her performance art at the 2012 Gwangju Art Biennial and created an interactive portion of The Exchange Archive at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2013. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, the Kadist Collection, and the McCord Museum.

Amelia is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.