Parul Wadhwa

Parul Wadhwa is an immersive and interactive media director. As an artist and creative technologist, her work includes virtual and augmented reality experiences and serious games. She is interested in the use of new technologies (AR/VR/XR) for social impact. Her research focuses on spatial design’s participation in marginalization of voices but also investigates its’ opportunities for building accessible experiences. Her VR experience, “Stories of Home” is the winner of the Best VR experience at Harlem International Film Festival, New York and has since been screened and nominated at more than a dozen festivals throughout the world including academy award qualifying Florida International Film Festival, META Women’s Day Festival (Singapore), FIVARS (Canada), Beijing Film Award (China) and several others. Her trauma based Virtual reality intervention piece based on post-colonial history and partition of India was also a recipient of several awards, grants and fellowships including the XR Alliance Quarter Finalist award. Her talks have been featured at various XR conferences including AWE, Siggraph, Anita Borg Foundation and several others. She has contributed her research and writing as a thought leader at The Transformative Tech Lab, Singularity University. She has been a mentor at the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), Panelist at the California Arts Council, Grants Panel Jury at the Center for Cultural Innovation and Jury – VR Immersive Pavilion at ACM SIGGRAPH. In 2020, she was featured by AWE on Women’s History Month under the series “Women Making History in XR”. She holds a MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from University of California Santa Cruz where she was a Regents Scholar, Art Dean’s Excellence Award recipient and her research in XR and storytelling was presented to California state senators at the UC Research Advocacy Day at California’s Capitol Hill, Sacramento. She has taught as the Program Leader of NYU’s Professional Certificate Program – UX in Emerging Technologies AR/VR/XR and the Program Leader of MIT’s Professional Certificate Program -Games and Interactive Media. Parul has a prior background in digital media and VFX and has lived and worked in several countries including India, South Korea and United Kingdom.