A short about, in a few unstudied paragraphs.

Laila Jhané (she/her) is a creative researcher, AI educator, and new media artist based in Atlanta. She treats AI as a creative medium, not a shortcut, and builds work that keeps the seams visible.

The practice moves between three rooms. One holds installations: Pepper’s Ghost optics, projection-mapped canopies, depth-camera tracking, and audio-reactive generative models. Another holds classrooms and panels, where filmmakers, students, and institutions try tools out loud together. The third is a quiet desk for writing, reading, and Mindscapes, the newsletter.

Her solo debut, Where The Mind Goes, opened at Eyedrum in 2024 and has since been rebuilt as a walkable 3D Gaussian Splat gallery. City In A Forest, a Fulton County Public Art Futures Lab commission made with Chanell Angeli, showed at the 2025 Atlanta Art Fair alongside Haring and Mickalene Thomas. AVC Fest (2025) used live audio to drive an interactive Pepper’s Ghost at Eyedrum.

She has led 16+ workshops at places like Spelman, Fort Valley State, Firelight Media, Third World Newsreel, and the Atlanta Blockchain Center, and spoken at Atlanta Film Festival, Athens Film Festival, Atlanta AI Week, the Game AI Conference, and the Sci-Fi Film Festival / Georgia Tech panel on AI worldbuilding. She was a finalist judge for the Motion Awards 2025.

By day she works at Kennesaw State University as AI Engagement Communications Strategist, helping the campus community make sense of what these tools are, and aren’t.

She is openly skeptical about AI platforms training on artists’ work without transparency or consent, and teaches from that position: tools in one hand, the consent question in the other. The through-line is self-sovereignty: for artists, for Atlanta, for anyone trying to make something of their own with the machines we’ve been handed.

laila