About Us 

My Data and Me: Una Storia d'Amore                                                                             




was born from the collaboration between Richard Pettifer, director and librettist and  Tomasz  Prasqual composer and sound architect, with significant contributions from key collaborators Francesca Martini (Soprano, libretto) and Cristina Lelli (Design) and in collaboration with the HUMAINT program at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (Seville) and the ensemble Electronic ID (Cologne). 
 

Richard Pettifer (Director) is a freelance director, critic, and scholar based in Berlin. He is part of the collective Atelierhaus Australische Botschaft OST, which is housed in the former Australian Embassy of East Berlin. He writes criticism on his critical writing platform Theaterstück, as well as for publications such as Samizdat (ROM) and Arterritory (LAT) and journals Symbolon and Methis. His work often concerns climate change and art activism, emphasising our complicity with the global system through distancing mechanisms in culture. Currently he is collaborating with scientists from the European Commission on an opera on the theme of Big Data.


Tomasz Prasqual (Composer) works as composer, sound architect, conductor, pianist, performer and educator. His work is focused on transmedial opera/theatre and stage projects, electronic music, microtonality and spatialization, strongly connected to artistic research in fields of music/architecture, rituality and performance and fluid identity. 




Francesca Martini (Soprano) is an Opera singer, whose experience and interest go from the classical repertoire to the avant-garde projects and commimling with theatre and performing arts. She works regularly in theatres as Filarmonico of Verona, San Carlo in Napoli, Teatro Coccia in Novara, Comunale of Ferrara, Pardo of Trapani, Festival Puccini in Torre del Lago in classical productions. She has also many experiences of tournée and recitals. Her interest as artist is also focused on experimenting with technology and reducing distances between the artist and the audience.One of her personal avant-garde projects is Ariadne, which brought her to many different exclusive stages in Europe and in the USA.

Cristina Lelli (Designer) is an Italian set and costume designer. She passionately works for performing arts, on and behind the stage, where her aesthetics focuses on the transition of bodies, materials and shapes. In her designs she strives to avoid material waste, working with the principles of DIY and re- and upcycling.
She worked for several german theaters among which Maxim Gorki Theater, Sophiensaele, Radialsystem V in Berlin, Elbphilharmonie and Kampnagel in Hamburg, Bauhaus in Dessau.
She has collaborated since 2014 as costume designer with the Berlin-based music theater company Nico and the Navigators; their last staged concert “Niemand Stirbt in der Mitte seines Lebens”, premiered in 2019 in the “Palais des Beaux Arts” in Brüssels.
Marina Escobar Planas (Software Developer) is a passionate about Artificial Intelligence and robots. She supports the HUMAINT research team that studies the impact of AI in human behaviour. Previously she worked developing a virtual assistant for a Canadian company, managing a technical support team of a robotics company and supporting another research team in computer vision.  She has a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master degree in logic, computer science and artificial intelligence from the University of Seville.

Emilia Gómez (Lead Scientist) is Lead Scientist of the HUMAINT project at the Joint Research Centre, European Commission (EC). She is also Guest Professor at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where she leads the Music Information Research lab and coordinates the TROMPA (Towards Richer Online Music Public-domain Archives) H2020 project. Her background is in Telecommunication Engineering (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain), DEA in Acoustics, Signal Processing and Computer Science applied to Music (IRCAM, Paris) and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. Her research is centred around the Music Information Retrieval field. Starting from music, she researches on the impact of artificial intelligence into human behaviour. 
Emilia Gómez has co-authored >130 peer-reviewed publications, open datasets and software packages. She has supervised 7 PhD theses (8 ongoing) and contributed to a high number of funded projects (4 as PI). She was also a co-founder of the MTG spin-off company BMAT. Her work is recognized by means of citations (e.g. > 4.700 in google scholar, h-index=32), media appearances, honours and awards.



Caroline Skibinski (Cultural Manager and Creative Producer) born 1988, based in Cologne, is a freelance cultural manager and creative producer in the field of performing arts. Since January 2020 she is working as a Community Manager (permanent) for mosaic - International Consulting for the network “Western Balkan Alumni Association (WBAA)”.



Giuseppa Prestigiacomo (Software Developer) based in Berlin is a SEO/Editor and Software Developer. Always searching for ways to widen and deepen her professional domain, she is interested to the harmonious combination of different fields of knowledge such as science, technology and art.