Michaela 
Pňaček(ová), PhD is an award-winning XR creator, producer and researcher. She focuses on human-computer interaction in extended realities (XR) and the ways emerging media impact the real through interaction with AI. She brings a co-creative and participatory perspective to research, art practice and teaching. During her time in Canada, she worked as a researcher at the Bridge2AI Project at Simon Fraser University (CA) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH, USA) focusing on ethical design of medical AI. After she finished her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at York University, Toronto in 2024 with the practice-based research in emerging media and biosensing, she returned to Berlin where she worked as a researcher for a multisensory project MIDAP at Folkwang University of Arts in Essen and UdK Berlin. In September 2026 she moved to Trondheim, Norway and started her new endeavour as a postdoctoral fellow at the EU Horizon Project European AI Commons - Shaping AI for the Creative and Cultural Industries (EAiCCI), where she focuses on EU sovereign design of AI.

Apart from her research, she spends her time creating and exhibiting XR work that feeds into her research. In 2025 she co-created and co-designed a real-time interactive voice AI experience When The Computer Says Nah supported by Fraunhofer Institute and Hasso-Plattner Institute, which was exhibited at Mozilla Festival and Interspeech Festival in 2025. Since 2017, she was commissioned to work as creative technologist and creative director for projects such as FairEVA - a Mozilla Trustworthy AI Project, Sensorium (CA), Peripheral Visions Lab (CA), Reeperbahn Music Festival (DE) and others. She is the co-creator and producer of Symphony of Noise VR (Best XR Installations List 2019 by Forbes Magazine, FIVARS Award for Excellence in Sound Design, Toronto 2020), which premiered at IDFA Doc Lab Competition and was exhibited worldwide. She was the co-producer of Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter VR (Sundance Film Festival 2020), co-creator and producer of the Pre-Crime Calculator App (2017) and producer of three feature length documentaries (Border Cut 2018, Waterproof 2019, Scars 2020). Recipient of Helen Carswell Award 2022, CIBC Student Award 2021, Marseille Web Fest Award 2019, Dok Leipzig EWA Award 2017, Golden Frog Award for Best Czech and Slovak Feminist Play 2009 and VRNow 2021 Best VR Entertainment Nominee.