Russell Ladson

Russell Ladson is an artist and researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

He is a PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

Before Berkeley, he was a Creative Science member at NEW INC., an incubator for people working at the intersection of art, design, and technology at the New Museum in New York City.

He was recently an artist-in-residence at Mara Brock Akil’s Story27 Productions in Los Angeles developing his upcoming project, This Ain’t About Resiliency. This Is About Regeneration, that engages the aesthetics and politics of fungal displacement and dislocation to non-Earth locations. The project received a grant from the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research.

His master’s thesis at NYU, Myco-Interfaces: Exploring Sensor Technologies in Mycelial Networks, examined how mycelium, the root system for fungi, can be used as an agent in designing novel, speculative biological interfaces in human-computer interaction. 

Before graduate school, he co-founded Drop, a venture-backed VR/AR startup that developed one of the first spatial browsers for the immersive web. Drop created one of the top downloaded virtual reality titles on the HTC Vive. Drop is venture backed by HTC, MACRO, Backstage Capital, and Matter Ventures.  

He is a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Art’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and Arts Politics where he earned two master’s degrees on a Dean’s Fellowship. He holds a BA from Morehouse College.