Eva Fischer

ANIMATION

Eva Fischer is an independent curator, festival director, and cultural manager in media art, immersive media, and art and technology. She studied art history and cultural management at institutions in Graz, Utrecht, and Vienna. She has been director of the media art festival Civa since 2021. In 2007 she initiated sound:frame, which became known as the Vienna Festival for Audiovisual Art and has been operating as a platform for immersive art and technology since 2016. Between 2016 and 2019 she was production manager of the Diagonale festival in Graz and between 2023 and 2025 COO of the International Screen Institute in Vienna. Since 2011 she has been teaching at various universities and universities of applied sciences in the field of experimental media and immersive art.
©Elodie Grethen

Nino Leitner

SHORT FILM

Nino Leitner is an award-winning cinematographer and filmmaker based in Vienna, Austria , and the Co-CEO of CineD, a leading platform for camera and filmmaking technology coverage . Over his career, Leitner has filmed an exceptionally broad range of subjects – from wildlife documentaries in Africa to high-end commercial campaigns – demonstrating remarkable versatility as a director of photography . His feature-length documentary Every Step You Take (2007) earned multiple awards on the international film festival circuit, garnering widespread acclaim for its incisive exploration of surveillance culture . Beyond his own productions, Leitner has shaped the industry through knowledge-sharing: he co-founded CineD (one of the film industry’s most reputable camera-technology news platforms) and co-heads the education platform MZed, influencing both the discourse on cinematography tech and the development of the next generation of filmmakers . His professional contributions and thought leadership have solidified his reputation as a respected authority in the film and video community.

Michaela Javorsky

DOCUMENTARY & TV PRODUCTION

Having a long history at ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation), mostly in the field of Entertainment TV and, from 2014 to 2021 in Program Development & Quality Management, specialized on international formats, she has returned to ORF’s Entertainment TV in 2021 and is currently responsible for numerous programs including many co-productions for ORF as TV program manager. 
©Michaela Seemann

Astrid Drechsler

SOUND & MUSIC

Astrid Drechsler studied telecommunications and media at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten. Between 2008 and 2011 she worked as a freelance production technician in the radio department of ORF Funkhaus Vienna. From 2010 to 2014, she was a research assistant at the Institute for Creative\Media/Technologies at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, where she has done research in the field of sound studies. In 2013 she founded a multimedia agency and has been producing for radio plays, radio features and film as a sound engineer and sound designer since then. Between 2014 and 2020 she was an artistic assistant at the Chair of Experimental Radio at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. Since 2020 she is working as a Senior lecturer for sound design at the FH JOANNEUM in the master's degree program Communication, Media, Sound and Interaction Design.

Philip Pürcher

CONTENT CREATION & PRODUCTION

Gesine Schmidt-Schmiedbauer

VISUAL ART & DESIGN

Philip Pürcher studied media technology and digital media technologies at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences and has been working as a freelance cameraman and drone pilot since graduating in 2016. He works primarily in the areas of live events and TV documentaries. His projects include TV productions such as “Universum” and “Herrschaftszeiten” as well as live documentation of major events such as Erste Bank Open Vienna, Ö3 Weihnachtswunder, Ironman and different projects for Red Bull. 
His passion is to touch people with images and capture unique moments that deserve to be preserved.

Andrea Mayr-Stalder

INTERACTIVE

Gesine Schmidt-Schmiedbauer is co-founder of one step beyond, a consultancy specialising in strategic communication, narratives, and hope-based communications for social change. With roots in human rights, she advises organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières, Ben & Jerry’s Social Mission, and Greenpeace International. As an art advisor at artcare, a Vienna-based platform for young and contemporary art, she focuses on narrative and the values and stories artists express through their practice. She serves on the board of flomyca – Floridsdorf Museum for Young and Contemporary Art, supporting emerging artists in their transition from university to the art world.
© Kataneva

Reanne Leuning

ALUMNI PROJECTS

Andrea Mayr-Stalder studied Visual Media Art in Peter Weibel’s class at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, just at the moment when everything was moving from analog to digital. In the early days of the Web, she was involved in growing two arts-based ISPs, Silverserver in Vienna and The Thing in NYC. Since the early 2000s, she initiated multiple communities around open source educational software. In 2015, she founded Turtlestitch, a free online platform for generative embroidery designs, combining the abstraction of coding with the haptics of textiles. In 2017, it received the Open Educational Resources Award for the German-speaking (DACH) region. The core of the project is a large community of educators, designers and students. The platform counts over 25’000 registered users and more than 50’000 open source pattern designs.
©S.Stalder