By Ann Hoevel
Heidi Boisvert has been named the chair of the School of Arts, Entertainment, and Creative Technologies at Georgia Tech. She begins the new role on August 1, 2026.
As the experience economy (industries such as gaming, film, live performance, and music) converges thanks to the seismic effect of artificial intelligence, Boisvert says this new school will prepare students to think well beyond the technologies and tools available today.
“We really want to teach students how to design experiences that will engage the broader public in a way that is ethical and human-centered,” she said.
“So many things are responsive environments these days, even robotics, so how do we bring spatial audio, VR, AR, gaming platforms, robotics, sensor-based environments together in one environment to create experiences?” she said. “How do we create not just a school but a research and development incubator to prototype the future of creative technologies and the creative industries through radical experimentation and prototyping?”
The answer, Boisvert said, is a population of students that thrive at Georgia Tech — problem solvers with an enormous range of technical and artistic capacity.
Not only will the School of Arts, Entertainment, and Creative Technologies prepare students for rapidly changing creative industries, Boisvert’s goal is to support them in inventing the future of technology for these fields.
“My sense is that we’re going to attract a lot of polymaths,” she said. “The type of students I think we’re going to draw to the program are actually engineers and computer scientists.”
“But they also have an expressive interest. They might be a dancer, or movie-maker, or a painter, or a musician that is driven by the desire to tell critical stories or to devise experiences to help shift our consciousness.”
These resourceful students naturally care about society, Boisvert said. “We need storytellers, we need designers, we need creative technologists — all of the people who are trying to unpack the human condition and maintain our social fabric through human connection as these technological systems evolve.”
Boisvert joins colleagues in the College of Design who regularly combine creative and sometimes traditional fine arts skills with technological development. Indeed, the School of Arts, Entertainment, and Creative Technologies is a fundamentally interdisciplinary school, leaning on the foundation of a studio-based learning environment.
“The College of Design is the home for Georgia Tech students who are as driven to be creative as they are to build new technologies and think like engineers,” said Ellen Bassett, dean and John Portman Chair in the College of Design. “The School’s primary undergraduate degree gives students the most creative option in the state of Georgia for combining those talents into viable, thriving careers. Georgia Tech is truly pioneering this kind of creative technology field of study.”
“Heidi Boisvert’s career is an excellent example for our students, showing how this combination of fine arts skills and technological curiosity creates a career that is always evolving, always ready to push our experience of entertainment forward,” Bassett said.
Boisvert is an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist, and academic researcher who interrogates the neurobiological and socio-cultural effects of media and technology.
She founded futurePerfect lab, a creative agency and think-tank that works with social justice organizations to design playful emerging media campaigns to transform the public imagination. She also co-founded XTH, a company creating novel modes of expression through biotechnology and the human body. She worked with David Byrne on Theater of the Mind, an immersive theater piece and co-curated EdgeCut, a live performance series that explores human-digital relationships.
Boisvert joins Georgia Tech from the University of Florida, where she was Associate Professor of AI & the Arts, a Senior Research Fellow at the Norman Lear Center, a research affiliate in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT, and a member of NEW INC’s Creative Science track.
She studies the role of the body, the senses, and emotion in human perception and social change. Boisvert is mapping the world’s first media genome, while taking great care with its far-reaching ethical implications.
Her work has been showcased at venues including EMPAC, New York Live Arts, Banff, the New Museum, Los Angeles Music Center and Waag, and featured in TIME, Wired, Fast Company, The Atlantic, NPR, and The New York Times.
