Women in Immersive Technologies Meetup UK x GLOW: Illuminating Innovation

On 19 April, join Women In Immersive Technologies UK and King's College London for an in-person meet-up filled with inspiring chats, live demos, networking and collaboration!

This event will bring together and champion the WIIT communities of inspiring, like-minded women, those who identify as women and non-binary in immersive tech to meet, connect, share resources, and celebrate the successful run of GLOW: Illuminating Innovation, an exhibition showcasing leading women artists who have been at the forefront of the immersive arts, exploring virtual & augmented realities.

Arrive early to dive into the GLoW exhibition at The Arcade Bush House and Strand Aldwych (free and open all day!), then head to the River Room (King’s Building) to kickstart your weekend with drinks on arrival.

The new WIIT UK Ambassador Muki Kulhan will host, toast and chat to Sarah Atkinson, GLOW’s curator and King’s College London Professor of Screen Media, who will reveal the secret sauce behind the planning and process of curating GLoW. Special guests include Juliana Silva from Latinas in Tech endorsing gender equality from the Latino and Hispanic communities, and long-time WIIT ally Dave Haynes from FOV Ventures with updates about our DVSRTY partner programme as well as new financial and investment opportunities for female founders & entrepreneurs.

Agenda

3:00 pm-5:00 pm: GLOW exhibition, free (The Arcade Bush House and Strand Aldwych)

5:00 pm-5:30 pm: Meetup Drinks in River Room, King’s Building

5:30 pm-6:30 pm: Welcome from WIIT UK Ambassador Muki Kulhan, plus Mini-Fireside Chats with Sarah Atkinson (GLOW/KCL), Juliana Silva (Latinas in Tech EU), Dave Haynes, DVRSITY partner & CEO of FOV Ventures

6:30 pm-8:00 pm: Networking Drinks & Live Demos

8:00 pm: Meetup Ends

Speakers

• Muki Kulhan kicked off the year as the recently appointed UK Ambassador for Women in Immersive Technologies Europe, the NGO close to her heart since its inception in 2016, and formed to create an inclusive network of talented women and those who identify as women who are driving and inspiring the virtual, augmented, mixed reality and spatial computing sectors. By day, Muki is a friendly and familiar face on the global XR scene as an in-demand, professional MC/Host, Moderator and Keynote Speaker via her career as a multi-award-winning CIO, Executive XR Producer and Creative Technologist with over two decades of pioneering interactive, immersive experiences for music, sport, entertainment & broadcasting. Muki is also currently the Innovation Lead for the IBC Accelerators Media Innovation Programme, steering high-level consortiums to develop open collaboration and groundbreaking R&D solutions for industry-recognised challenges in XR/Emerging Media and Broadcast Engineering, Synthetic Humans, Talent IP, Volumetric Video, Virtual Production, 5G Motion Capture for Live Performance & Animation, Interoperable 3D Assets, Web3, 6DOF Spatial Audio and more.
  
  
• Sarah Atkinson is Professor of Screen Media at King's College London, Editor of Routledge Resources Online: Screen Studies, and co-editor of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Sarah has published widely on the film, cinema, screen, and immersive technology industries. She is currently an Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellow and curator of GLOW: Illuminating Innovation, a new exhibition which showcases ground-breaking creativity by women in technology at various locations on Strand Aldwych, London. The exhibition stems from her forthcoming book with Vicki Callahan: Mixed Realities: Gender & Emergent Media (Wayne State University Press, 2025).
  
  
• Juliana Silva is a London Chapter Lead at Latinas in Tech and a recent graduate of Goldsmiths University’s MA in Virtual & Augmented Reality: 3D Graphics and User Experience Pathway. Passionate about storytelling, world-building, and cultural immersion, Juliana aims to connect people and ideas through immersive technologies. She is currently an Expanded Realities Exhibition Assistant at the Open City Documentary Festival 2024 whose exhibition, Losing Home, showcases the sensation of alienation.
  
  
• Dave Haynes is partner at FOV Ventures, backing founders building the Metaverse. Dave previously led HTC’s $100m Vive X fund in EMEA and was part of the investment team at Seedcamp (Fund III). Metaverse-related portfolio and angel investments include Wave, LIV, ReadyPlayerMe, Crucible and many others. Prior to investing, Dave founded two of his own startups and was part of the founding team of SoundCloud. As a long-time supporter of gender equality in the workplace, Dave and FOV Ventures know that diversity within the startup and venture ecosystem is already an important and challenging topic. And place as much, if not more, importance on it when it comes to building out the Metaverse. Thus, the DVRSTY Programme was born, alongside a number of community partners including Women In Immersive Tech (WiiT), the XR Diversity Initiative (XRDI), AWE and many other allies that include investors and operators who all share an interest in keeping diversity front of mind as the Metaverse gets built out.