Influential Women in Creative Technology

In recent years, there’s been a welcome, increased focus on the contributions of women in technology, especially within the area of creative technology where art and innovative digital tools meet. Women around the world have emerged to take on roles of influence and leadership in this rapidly expanding field. 

Women who earn an online M.A. in Creative Technology through the SMU Meadows School of the Arts can help add to that history, joining a growing list of artists and digitals innovators who are exploring how innovations in areas such as blockchain, virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality, the metaverse and more can transform how people interact with art. 

Women Leaders in Creative Technology 

The legacy of women in technology dates back for generations. From the contributions of Grace Hopper and Mary Wilkes to the work on the NASA space program by Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan, women have made a big impact in an often male-dominated field. Women continue to work as leaders in the field where creativity and technology merge.

The following women are a few examples of those blazing trails in the fascinating new area of creative technology.  

Danielle King 

Danielle King is the CFO and COO of ClubNFT, which helps collectors protect the value of their NFT collection. A graduate from the MBA program at the Yale School of Management, King also holds a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University. She spent eight years overseeing the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before launching ClubNFT. 

Her mixture of business and art backgrounds with a focus on technology have helped make King an influential figure in the creative technology field. Her work includes a series of images known as ‘The Muses' that reimagines the concept of the artist’s muse. Her many ventures also include an online magazine called RightClickSave, where King also serves as CFO and COO. The magazine focuses on engaging readers about NFTs and art on the blockchain, including interviews with talented artists.

Danika Laszuk 

Danika Laszuk specialized for years in helping companies bring products to market, and now heads Betaworks Camp, the thematic investment and residency program for Betaworks. Her work focuses on helping the company identify frontier technology to support. She previously worked for almost a decade at Apple, overseeing product marketing for numerous iPod generations and developing marketing strategy for the first iPhone. She also worked at HP, where she managed the launch of its first consumer laptop. 

Laszuk’s interest “in exploring how consumers interact with new technology and new behaviors that emerge has sparked her ambition for creating categories from scratch and building them to significant scale,” according to her biography on Center for a New American Security. 

Ivona Tau   

Dr. Ivona Tau is a generative AI artist who works with artificial intelligence as a medium. She holds a master’s degree in mathematics from Warsaw University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology. A wide variety of venues and events have exhibited her work, including Art Basel Miami Beach, SCOPE, CAFA, Art Week Shenzhen, Vellum, Bitforms New York, Venus Over Manhattan, The House of Fine Art, Bright Moments Berlin and Sotheby’s New York.  

Tau, from Vilnius, Lithuania, “works with neural networks and code as a medium in experimental photography and motion painting,” according to her website biography. She seeks to find and evoke emotions through AI tools. She also transforms her experiences that are captured on analog and digital film through generative neural networks.  

She’s earned many awards for her work, including the best award at the Digital Arts 2020 contest for art created with AI and the Computer Animation category award at the Computer Space International Computer Art Forum 2021. She also was elected as one of the Top 10 Women in AI 2022 by the Women in Tech Foundation. SMU professor Ira Greenberg recently spoke with Tau about AI and art, and reflected on how computational tools have shaped their respective practices and changed their approach to the older mediums they work in. 

Anika Meier 

Anika Meier is important in the creative technology field as both a writer and curator of digital art. She developed König Digital for König Galerie in Berlin and also curated, along with Johann König, the exhibition series “The Artist is Online” at König Digital. Her other work includes working with CIRCA on the first NFT drop by Marina Abramović and with Quantum for Herbert W. Franke’s NFT drop, “Math Art.” 

Meier wrote a popular column on art and social media for the German art magazine Monopol and now writes a column on digital art for the magazine, Kunstforum. She also writes for RightClickSave. 

Savannah Niles  

Los Angeles-based Savannah Niles is a design thought leader in artificial reality, virtual reality and extended reality. Niles designed prototypes for hardware and software products during her time at Magic Leap in South Florida, including those involving more than 20 patent applications and grants.  

A graduate from MIT media lab, she also previously designed interactive experiences for Walt Disney Imagineering and Twitter. She most recently served as leader of product experience and design at Magnopus. Many in creative technology know her best for her service on the board of Filmgate Miami, a not-for-profit production studio that supports innovative storytellers. She also supports FilmGate Interactive, “the first festival in the U.S. to solely showcase interactive and immersive stories, as well as the technology that supports them,” according to her website. 

Diane Durbay 

Diane Durbay is founder of We Are Museums, a community of people worldwide who want to use innovative technology to help transform museums into “society’s new mentors and architects of change in respect of people and the planet.” 

We Are Museums operates with six specific goals. Topping the list is fostering change that results in a climate-resilient future through community-based actions, as well as encouraging cultural diversity and strengthening social cohesion. The goals also include using digital technologies for social and environmental good. 

Durbay, who lives in Berlin, also co-founded alterHEN, an artist-run NFT gallery, as well as Arteztic, a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) for environmental artists.

The SMU Meadows School of the Arts is dedicated to fostering the success of women in creative technology. SMU’s Master of Arts in Creative Technology is 100% online and combines creative and design disciplines with core and emerging digital technologies to generate innovative solutions that are growing in demand across industries. Learn more about this one-of-a-kind graduate program and apply today.