Faith “Aya” Umoh is an award-winning new media artist, director, and data scientist whose multidisciplinary work blends cultural narratives with emerging technology. With 15 years of experience in technology and a Master’s in Biostatistics and Public Health, she has developed 11 AI-driven products, including her first co-creative AI tool funded by a Stanford research grant. Aya’s practice spans generative AI, motion capture, and participatory design, building immersive experiences that explore identity, memory, and ancestral knowledge in transformative ways. 

Her work has been presented in 15 exhibitions across eight countries, including Artists Who Code with W1 Curates and Artsy in London and the Max Ernst Museum in Germany. In 2024, Aya debuted her solo show Aya’s Rhythmic Wave at UCLA’s Social Software Lab, reimagining African diasporic dance through AI and performance. In 2025, she received the MIT Reality Hack XR Grand Prize and Black Public Media’s Immersive Pitch award for her pioneering approach to cultural preservation and co-creation through immersive technology. 

Aya is currently a Royal Shakespeare Company Artist Research Fellow and an Artist-in-Residence at The Music Center Los Angeles. Beyond her individual practice, she is developing the DanceAR plugin, a tool that streamlines the complex pipeline from motion capture to AR performance making immersive storytelling more participatory and accessible for creators, educators, and institutions.

At its core, her work is a call to reimagine storytelling infrastructures. By merging technology with heritage, Aya builds replicable systems that not only honor cultural memory but also expand who gets to create and share immersive narratives. Her vision is to democratize immersive tools so that XR can be a space of both preservation and invention, where communities worldwide can carry their stories forward, in their own voices.