Jury
Marko Bolkovic | Croatia
Marko Bolkovic is the founder and director of the Visualia Light Festival in Pula — the first festival in Croatia dedicated to light art, launched in 2013. With a career that bridges art, technology, and cultural production, Marko has been active for over 20 years in the fields of light design, sound, and new media.
Throughout his career, he founded the Sonitus Association and the Visualia Group art collective, through which he has developed numerous video mapping projects, interactive light installations, and participatory works showcased at renowned international festivals such as Lumina Festival (Portugal), Bella Skyway (Poland), Luna Festival (Netherlands), and 1 Min Mapping (Japan).
Michiyuki Ishita | Japan
Michiyuki Ishita is a creative director, media artist, and spatial experience designer working in Japan and internationally. Viewing moving images as a form of light, he creates unique spatial experiences that transform architecture, landscapes, and public spaces.
With extensive experience spanning art, technology, entertainment, and urban spaces, Ishita is internationally recognized as a leading figure in projection mapping and spatial visual expression. He is regularly invited to festivals, competitions, and cultural projects around the world as a producer, creative director, speaker, lecturer, and jury member.
Pionty Jakub Jezierski | Poland
Pionty Jakub Jezierski is an interdisciplinary visual artist living in Warsaw, an architect by training and a lecturer affiliated with the Faculty of Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2023, he defended his doctoral thesis titled “Visual Forms of Protest and their Influence on the Formation of Social Attitudes”. He specializes in press design, branding, exhibition design, typography and illustration. Winner of the Gold Medal in the thematic competition of the 27th International Poster Biennale in Warsaw. Recipient of the Scholarship for Outstanding Young Scientists from the Minister of Science and Higher Education in 2024.
Jib Koolkaew | Thailand
Jib Koolkaew is the Founder and Creative Director of DECIDE KIT, an independent motion graphic and immersive design studio founded in 2006.
For over two decades, she has explored how storytelling, design, and technology can come together to create meaningful visual experiences. Working across motion graphics, projection mapping, immersive installations, and 3D environments, she approaches each project with curiosity and continues to learn, experiment, and create alongside her team.
Marinella Paderni | Italy
Marinella Paderni is an art historian, academic teacher and curator. She teaches history of contemporary art, history of design and curatorial practices at the Fine Arts Academy in Bologna. Her research focuses on different languages of contemporary arts from the point of view of phenomenology, examining the relationships between artistic production, science and technology. During her curatorial activity she has curated several exhibitions on new tendencies in contemporary art since the 2000s, in particular on the themes of landscape, environment, urban anthropology.
Abdul Shakir (Grasshopper) | Malaysia
Abdul Shakir (also known as ‘Grasshopper’) is a multidisciplinary multimedia digital artist focused on projection mapping, new media art and audio visual art installation and also known as one of the co-founders of Filamen, a new media art collective.
Shakir exhibited his work in several renowned platforms such as the Urbanscapes Art Festival, Rainforest in the City, George Town Festival, Jakarta Light Fest and Singapore Night Festival.
Ewa Maria Śmigielska | Poland
Ewa Maria Smigielska is a Polish artist and professor (Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw Department of Design) specializing in performative sculpture, sound and light installations, drawing, and video art. She graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2012 and received her PhD in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Grzegorz Kowalski.
She is currently a Professor in the Sculpture Department at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China. Her honors include the Polish Ministry of Education’s Outstanding Young Scientists Scholarship (2022).
Her works have been presented at numerous prestigious contemporary centers, festivals and venues around the world in Poland, Germany, China, Denmark, Finland and the United Kingdom, such as the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Barbara Hepworth Museum in England, and the Luo Song Li Art Museum in China, among others.
Hendrik Wendler | Germany
Hendrik Wendler studied architecture at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and founded device+context, a software company that develops the MXWendler video mapping software package. Since 2004, these media servers have been illuminating clubs, theatres and façades all over the world. In 2012, he founded the artistic festival platform Genius Loci Weimar for the young art direction of video mapping.