NIME Leaders — People, Roles & Where to Follow Them

NIME Leaders Workshop Facilitators

A directory of people who have shaped NIME — founders, long-history figures, former conference chairs, and the leaders of NIME’s committees and initiatives — with links to their sites where we could verify them. Useful for Session 1 (seeing the breadth of roles and the people behind them) and as a “who to follow / who to ask” map for future leaders.

On verification: Roles and URLs below were checked against NIME’s own pages (nime.org, the past-NIMEs record, committee sites) and each person’s site where possible. A missing URL means we did not verify one, not that none exists. Facilitator URLs are taken from the workshop’s own application. Corrections welcome — institutional roles change.

Founders / origins (the CHI 2001 NIME workshop)

NIME began as a workshop at ACM CHI 2001 (Seattle). The workshop proposal — Poupyrev, Lyons, Fels & Blaine, “New Interfaces for Musical Expression,” CHI’01 Extended Abstracts, pp. 491–492 — carries the four people consistently described as co-founders. NIME became a standalone conference from 2002.

Ivan Poupyrev — first-listed author of the CHI’01 workshop proposal; then at Sony CSL, now Google ATAP. http://www.ivanpoupyrev.com/
Michael J. Lyons (Ritsumeikan University) — co-founder; co-editor of A NIME Reader; co-chaired NIME 2004 (Hamamatsu). https://kasrl.org/
Sidney (Sid) Fels (University of British Columbia) — co-founder; co-chaired NIME 2005 (Vancouver); directs the HCT Lab. https://ece.ubc.ca/sid-fels/
Tina “Bean” Blaine — co-founder; creator of the Jam-O-Drum; co-chaired NIME 2005; later CMU Entertainment Technology Center. https://www.etc.cmu.edu/blog/author/tblaine/

Deep-history figures (threaded through NIME)

Marcelo M. Wanderley (McGill, IDMIL) — most-cited author across NIME’s first 20 years; chaired NIME 2003 (Montreal). https://www.idmil.org/people/marcelo-m-wanderley/
Alexander Refsum Jensenius (Oslo / RITMO) — co-editor of A NIME Reader; chaired NIME 2011 (Oslo); chaired the NIME Steering Committee 2011–2022. https://www.arj.no/
Atau Tanaka (Goldsmiths) — helped establish NIME; pioneer of EMG/biosignal performance; chaired NIME 2014 (London). http://www.ataut.net/ (HTTP only)
Joseph A. Paradiso (MIT Media Lab, Responsive Environments) — sensor-systems pioneer; chaired NIME 2002 (Dublin). https://www.media.mit.edu/people/joep/overview/
Perry R. Cook (Princeton, emeritus) — author of the seminal “Principles for Designing Computer Music Controllers” (NIME 2001); co-founder of PLOrk. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~prc/
Tod Machover (MIT Media Lab, Opera of the Future) — hyperinstruments pioneer. https://www.media.mit.edu/people/tod/overview/
Axel Mulder — early virtual/immersive-instrument researcher (SFU); I-CubeX / Infusion Systems sensor toolkit widely used at NIME. (Old academic site repurposed; no current personal URL verified.)

Former conference chairs, by year

Hosts and lead chairs as recorded in the official NIME past-conferences list (the record labels organisers simply “Chair(s)”; some editions used “general co-chairs”). Verified personal/lab URLs are linked inline.

Year	City / host	Chair(s)
2001	Seattle, USA (CHI’01 workshop)	Ivan Poupyrev, Michael J. Lyons, Sidney Fels, Tina Blaine
2002	Dublin, Ireland (Media Lab Europe)	Joe Paradiso, Sile O’Modhrain
2003	Montreal, Canada (McGill)	Marcelo Wanderley
2004	Hamamatsu, Japan (Shizuoka Univ. of Art & Culture)	Yoichi Nagashima, Michael J. Lyons
2005	Vancouver, Canada (UBC)	Sidney Fels, Tina Blaine
2006	Paris, France (IRCAM)	Norbert Schnell, Frédéric Bevilacqua
2007	New York City, USA (NYU / Harvestworks)	Carol Parkinson, Eric Singer
2008	Genoa, Italy (Univ. of Genova, InfoMus)	Antonio Camurri, Gualtiero Volpe
2009	Pittsburgh, USA (Carnegie Mellon)	Noel Zahler, Roger Dannenberg
2010	Sydney, Australia (UTS)	Kirsty Beilharz, Andrew Johnston, Bert Bongers
2011	Oslo, Norway (Univ. of Oslo)	Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Kjell Tore Innervik
2012	Ann Arbor, USA (Univ. of Michigan)	Georg Essl
2013	Daejeon, South Korea (KAIST)	Woon Seung Yeo
2014	London, UK (Goldsmiths)	Atau Tanaka, Rebecca Fiebrink
2015	Baton Rouge, USA (LSU)	Jesse T. Allison, Edgar Berdahl
2016	Brisbane, Australia (Griffith)	Andrew Brown, Toby Gifford
2017	Copenhagen, Denmark (Aalborg Univ. CPH)	Dan Overholt, Stefania Serafin
2018	Blacksburg, USA (Virginia Tech)	Ivica Ico Bukvic, Matthew Burtner
2019	Porto Alegre, Brazil (UFRGS)	Rodrigo Schramm, Marcelo Johann
2020	Birmingham, UK (Birmingham City Univ.; online)	Lamberto Coccioli, Sally Jane Norman
2021	Shanghai, China (NYU Shanghai)	Margaret Minsky, Gus Xia
2022	Auckland, New Zealand (Univ. of Auckland)	Sasha Leitman, Fabio Morreale
2023	Mexico City, Mexico (UAM / Tec de Monterrey)	Hugo Solís García, Eric Pérez Segura
2024	Utrecht, Netherlands (HKU)	Hans Leeuw, Martijn Buser, Marije Baalman
2025	Canberra, Australia (ANU)	Charles Martin, Pia van Gelder
2026	London, UK (Imperial College & Loughborough Univ. London)	Andrew McPherson, Courtney N. Reed

NIME people to follow (active sites & blogs)

Alexander Refsum Jensenius — https://www.arj.no/ — active blog (music tech, AI, NIME organisation).
Charles Martin — https://charlesmartin.au/ — active blog (music tech & computing; NIME2025 reflections).
Anna Xambó — https://annaxambo.me/ — active blog with RSS; runs the WiNIME directory.
Andrew McPherson — http://andrewmcpherson.org/ (portfolio) and lab http://instrumentslab.org/ — dated news feed on the lab site.
Fabio Morreale — https://fabio.kiwi/ — news feed; critical-NIME writing.
Thor Magnusson — http://www.sonicwriting.org/ — news/blog (less recent); author of Sonic Writing; live coding.
Ivica Ico Bukvic — https://ico.bukvic.net/main/ — portfolio (no blog); founder of L2Ork.
Georg Essl — https://sites.uwm.edu/essl/ — static profile; mobile music; NIME Advisory Board.
Rebecca Fiebrink — https://www.arts.ac.uk/creative-computing-institute/people/rebecca-fiebrink — institutional profile (no personal blog verified); creator of Wekinator (http://www.wekinator.org/).

Committees & officers

The NIME Board is the governing body (it took over from the Steering Committee on 17 April 2024); it selects hosts/chairs and oversees the committees. https://nime.org/board/ — currently incl. Fabio Morreale (President), Juan Martinez Avila (Chair of Committees), Andrew McPherson (Continuity Officer), Stefano Fasciani (Proceedings Officer), Isabela Corintha Almeida (Member-at-large), Courtney N. Reed & Charles Martin (NIME 2026 / 2025 chairs).

Current committee leadership, per the official committees page (a good place to see who to contact — and where help is wanted):

Ethics Committee — lead Kerem Ergener; members Natalia Fuchs, Doga Cavdir. Maintains the NIME Principles & Code of Practice on Ethical Research (https://nime.org/ethics/).
Diversity Committee — co-leads Courtney Reed & João Tragtenberg; members Andrew McMillan, Yichen Wang, Zeynep Ozcan. https://diversity.nime.org/
Environmental Committee — lead Raul Masu; members Ha-Moon Young, Florent Berthaut, Benedict Gaster. Eco Wiki: https://eco.nime.org/ · statement: https://nime.org/environment/
WiNIME Committee — lead Isabela Corintha; members Aida Khorsandi, Eleni-Ira Panourgia. The Women-in-NIME directory itself is maintained by Anna Xambó: https://annaxambo.me/directory-of-winime/
LATAM NIME Committee — co-leads João Tragtenberg & Alvaro Lopez. https://latam.nime.org/

Officers: Mailing list — Andrew Johnston (lead), Michael Lyons, Tom Mitchell · Forum — S. Astrid Bin · Mentorship — Kerem Ergener (lead), Doga Cavdir · Sponsorship — currently unfilled.

See also organiser reflections for first-hand writing by several of the people above.