THE NEXT STAGE SALON
WHERE DO TOMORROW’S ART WEIRDOS COME FROM?

Michaela A. Ternasky-Holland is a Peabody-nominated and Emmy award-winning director who specializes in creating impactful stories using immersive and interactive technology. She is one of the first directors to create and premiere a short film utilizing Open AI’s SORA platform, which screened at Tribeca Festival. Her first original animated series garnered over 2.2 million views on YouTube within a month of release. As a nominee for the Producers Guild of America’s Innovation Award, she is also a consultant, speaker, and thought leader, who has been recognized as one of the 100 Original Voices of XR and listed as one of Blooloop’s 50 Immersive Influencers.

Katrina Lat is a Toronto-based researcher, experience designer, and client strategist. She holds an HBA from Ivey Business School.

Katrina has attended 1000+ immersive works across three continents, grounding her practice in one of the most robust bodies of firsthand field research in the sector. She has spoken at events such as London Experience Week, EEMAGINE India, TIFF, SXSW, and The Next Stage. At FITC in April 2025 she launched the AURA framework for determining quality of an immersive experience. ​

Past work includes projects with the College of Extraordinary Experiences, Coca-Cola,  and Microsoft. She is a member of the 2026 Odyssey Works EDCP Cohort and a Curator for No Proscenium.

Peter Flaherty is an artist and director who creates genre-defying work featuring intuitive interactivity about contemporary social topics. He conceived, directed, and produced Empire At Sea, a Solarpunk AR drama that won the prestigious Immersive Achievement Lion at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in 2026. He was Creative Director for Marvel Studios and Disney’s Eternals AR. His work has shown in over a hundred international venues, including Sundance, SXSW, Broadway, the Met Opera, Lincoln Center, the Bolshoi, BAM, the Barbican Center, and the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. He has received grants from The Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Sloan Foundations.

Whitton Frank is a voice, film, television and theater actor from Los Angeles. Her work in VR includes directing the English premiere of Find WiiLii, performing in the award winning VR worlds of The Under Presents and The Tempest, and the Ferryman Collective productions PARA, the award winning shows Welcome to Respite, Gumball Dreams and Uncanny Alley. She is a graduate of two prestigious acting universities, Carnegie Mellon University and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and is a recipient of CMU’s Tartans on the Rise award. She is currently a sought after speaker at tech and immersive events around the world.