PLAY

Meet creatives and studios across fashion, design, and emerging tech — SavoirFaire, Code and Theory, ArtBound Initiative, Eric Forman Studio, ChanceAI, and more.

Welcome to DIS:PLAY with a pillar overview and theme manifesto from the organizing team.

Film × Tech — make a short AI film from prompt to final cut. Footage without a camera. Powered by KLING.

• Tao Prompts— Content Creator · @taoprompts

Lightning talks from founders and builders at the edge of creative tech.

• Timothy Wang— Co-founder, Ponder · Room 131
• Merida Hou— Founding Member, Infron AI · Room 141

A conversation about staying restless inside structured environments. How do you push past “good enough,” when do side projects become real work, and what happens when your 9-to-5 output and your creative identity pull in different directions?

• Yi Lu— Moderator
• Nuoran Chen— Product Designer, The New York Times
• Yi Chen— Product Design Lead & Cross-Media Artist, Neon Commerce
• Izaac Crayton— Senior Product Designer, M&T Bank
• Limber Zhang— Group Design Supervisor, MINDS + ASSEMBLY

On building a studio that doesn’t wait for permission to experiment.

• Louis Moncouyoux— SavoirFaire

Creative tools change every year. Taste takes a decade to build. Practitioners at the edge of creative × tech talk about what lasts, what doesn’t, what they had to unlearn, and how to build a point of view that survives the next platform shift.

• Professor William Leon— Moderator · Cornell Tech
• Eric Forman— Founder, Eric Forman Studio
• Raj Muhar— Founder, Fyuz Labs
• Christopher Brignola— Co-Founder & CEO, Nuro Finance

Building a business and sales techniques for creatives.

• Khurram Kalimi— Author, CEO

For anyone who’s been told they’re “too creative for engineering” or “too technical for art.” How do you get a hybrid skill set taken seriously? When do you stop explaining what you do and just show it?

• Michelle Hui— Moderator
• Koh Terai— CEO & Co-Founder, Martini · YC W26
• Britney N.— Film Producer, HBO & Netflix
• Gazi J.— Software Engineer, Google · Content Creator
• Hanyong Yang— Web Designer & Manager, NYCxDESIGN

At the intersection of music and emerging tools — how AI is entering the creative process, reshaping workflows, and raising new questions around ownership, authorship, and sound.

• Soumya Duriseti— Moderator
• Juliette Rolnick— Product & Deployment of Music, ElevenLabs
• Polina Ivko— Entertainment Attorney & Partner, Adwar Ivko
• Jessica Gramuglia— Music Supervisor, Gramuglia Music & Media

Closing remarks and keynote to send everyone off.

• Professor Mukti Khaire

Hosted with Epic Connector. Mio Matcha pop-up. Rapid-fire student demos (4 minutes each, sign up in advance or at the event) plus open networking with speakers and founders.