Next-Gen LA
Digital Artists to Watch

Next-Gen LA: Digital Artists to Watch presented ten emerging and early-career artists based in the Los Angeles area.

Los Angeles has become a global hub for artists working with digital media. A city defined by its expanse, it is home to many diverse artist communities. Next-Gen LA was conceived as an annual series to foreground standout early-career digital artists whose work is shaping the next generation of art in the city and beyond. Works were shown on Luma Canvas LED displays.

About the artists

Ainslee Alem Robson, an LA-based Cleveland native, is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer, and media artist. Her work pushes beyond monolithic narratives of Africa and Blackness, pursuing the complexities of the liminal spaces between Africa and its diaspora. Through a transcultural, feminist, first-generation lens, she builds worlds around decolonial narratives using film and emerging technologies.

Aya, also known as Faith Umoh, is an interdisciplinary creative working across data science, African history, media culture, storytelling, generative art, and speculative technology. Her collections unfold at the intersection of Afrofuturism and artificial intelligence. Through a Stanford University BlackAIR grant, she worked on an AI co-creative system for imagining and rendering new worlds from books and music, part of a broader project to replace negative media portrayals with a revitalization of erased histories.

Breanna Browning is a media artist and creative director with studios in Los Angeles and her native rural Tennessee. Her practice merges digital and physical matter through the misuse of technological tools and traditional methods of making. A background in architecture and speculative fiction lets her work across scales, from the bit to the body, and from the landscape to the imaginary.

Caleb Craig (b. 1997) is a Los Angeles-based artist and performer creating long-term audiovisual projects with immersive media, music production, and digital fabrication. Their practice centers queer representation and politics and the body's changing relationship to society and technology, working across VR, 3D modeling and printing, couture, animation, and music.

Carrie Chen is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles (Gabrielino-Tongva land). Working with CGI animation, simulation, and projection, she explores digital figuration as a poetic means to express identity, presence, and immateriality. Raised between the US and China, she examines non-Western ontologies while reconfiguring her relationship to Chinese American identity and ancestry.

Connie Bakshi is an artist, classical musician, and engineer based in Los Angeles. Working mainly with artificial intelligence, she unfolds lore and rituals of the past that collide with dreams of post-colonial futures, mediating between digital memory embedded in AI and collective consciousness on the blockchain.

David Guerrero is a Los Angeles-based artist, musician, and coder. He combines generative analog and digital music with code to create abstract, expressive pieces. Drawing on how math shapes structure in nature, his static and audiovisual works form surreal, minimal environments.

Enrique Agudo (b. Madrid, 1989) works at the limits of digital media, focusing on pattern recognition in the digital imagery of contemporary culture and how it shapes behavior. He uses immersive and experimental media to question anthropological discourse around identity.

Hirad Sab is an Iranian-American artist working at the margins of digital aesthetics, internet culture, and technology. His amalgams sit at the intersection of culture and the democratic circulation of images, frequently depicting the human form, gesture, and activity in distinctly digital environments.

Nate Mohler (b. 1997, Los Angeles) is an emerging media artist who uses digital technology to build immersive experiences. Interested in the fusion of conceptual art and technology in support of social activism, he works with projection mapping, installation, sculpture, and video.