Jack Straw New Media Gallery

Aubrey Birdwell is a new media and installation artist whose practice merges post-digital aesthetics, computational processes, and media archaeology. His work explores architectures of language, disappearance, and digital decay through hybrid systems of light, code, and material. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.A. & B.S. dual degree from The Evergreen State College. Early travel along the highways and flea markets of the United States fostered a fascination with obsolescence, found objects, and the shifting landscapes of urban detritus. This sensibility evolved into a practice grounded in material culture and the archaeology of the contemporary past, especially the layers of technologies we leave behind. His current work extends this practice by fusing digital and analog processes to explore the aesthetics of disappearance and memory, constructing custom generative and feedback systems that map, traverse, and recombine obsolete media.

New Media Gallery 2026-27

Juliet McMains is a filmmaker, video installation artist, dance scholar, educator, and lifelong practitioner of improvisational social dance. She strives to translate the kinesthetic experiences of dancing to digital forms through cinematographic, editing, and video mapping techniques. Her artistic research is in dialogue with her academic research, which interrogates systems of gendered and racial power in American and Latin American social dance traditions. Juliet is author of Glamour Addiction (Wesleyan UP 2006) and Spinning Mambo into Salsa (Oxford UP 2015) as well as articles on salsa, rumba, ballroom, swing, and tango. She is the director of the film project Faces of Contemporary Tango (www.facesoftango.art) and is a Professor in the Department of Dance at the University of Washington. Juliet has a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California at Riverside and a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Harvard University.

New Media Gallery 2026-27 (with Paul Matthew Moore and Rose Xu)

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Paul Matthew Moore enjoys improvising, exploring new ideas, new creative practices, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Paul’s interests range from anthropology and astro/geophysics, to painting, philosophy, and zoology, including everything in between.

Paul began accompanying dance classes while he was an undergraduate studying music composition in the College of Creative Studies at UCSB. Since then, a daily practice of improvising music for dance, performing concerts, composing and producing for film, keeps Paul foraging into the interplay of light, sound, motion, culture, and technology.

Past performances include: Art Basel, Fusebox Festival, Club PuSh, The Wayward Music Series, OnTheBoards, Strictly Seattle, Bumbershoot, FolkLife, TBA Festival, REDCAT, and Jack Straw’s Sonarchy Radio. Paul’s upcoming releases include the film score for the critically acclaimed documentary Suburban Fury (Winner of the SIFF Grand Jury Prize 2025). Paul is the Music Director for the University of Washington Department of Dance.

New Media Gallery 2026-27 (with Juliet McMains and Rose Xu)

“Roseˮ Ziyu Xu (徐子瑜) is a new media researcher, choreographer, and performer working at the intersection of dance, media arts, and machine learning. Rejecting the dichotomy of art and science, she explores how shared human questions can be articulated across different disciplinary languages. Rather than complying with AI to generate or replace creative labor, Rose designs artist-centered machine learning systems that listen and respond to lived, embodied experience.

Over the past years, Roseʼs practice evolved from multimedia dance theater toward interactive systems integrating extended reality and machine intelligence, using the stage as a site to prototype future relationships between bodies, media, and computation. Across these works, Rose investigates how computational systems might engage embodied experience without erasing agency, ambiguity, or care. She is excited by collaborations with artists, musicians, technologists, and curators, and is pursuing a PhD in Digital Arts and Experimental Media DXARTS at the University of Washington, Seattle.

New Media Gallery 2026-27 (with Juliet McMains and Paul Matthew Moore)

ralph salazar is a visual artist and actress based in Seattle, WA. She creates assemblage sculptures and kinetic installations from video, performance, sound, and found material. With a visual language conflicted between comfort and urgency salazar investigates anxieties stemming from systemic failure. She unearths the hidden narratives of found materials that evoke notions of home, climate crisis, and the burden of labor under capitalism. salazar holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York and an MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle. Their work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally and she received Best Actress at the Queens World Film Festival, NY.

New Media Gallery 2026-27

jade wong is an experimental filmmaker, musician, and cook born and based in Seattle. They are deeply informed by their family’s history in restaurant work, in their role as a caretaker for their grandmother, and in the networks of care and resistance developed amongst their queer kin. They collage with non-fiction, sound, craft, and performance to explore the revelatory and healing potential of the senses. They are interested in storytelling, moments of levity and envisioning ways of collective being. They hold a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and attended the UCLA MFA program in New Genres from 2024-2025.

In addition to their solo practice, jade collaborates with hana shiozaki in ANKOKU, a live sound and movement project merging butoh, guitar, noise, light, and earth practices. Together, they create containers that induce presence for performer and audience, relying on chance and play for the work to emerge.

New Media Gallery 2026-27