Behrang Garakani

Behrang Garakani is a technologist, media scholar, and creative practitioner whose career spans enterprise engineering leadership, interactive entertainment, and experimental media art. He's one of the heads of technology at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he architects the institution's beneficial deployments of AI. Earlier in his career, he worked in R&D teams in telecommunications, then moving to the video game industry. He led game automation, operational analytics, and archival teams at Electronic Arts, and served as the Head of Product Intelligence at The Walt Disney Company where he chaired its first Interactive Braintrust.

He earned a BA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University and currently teaches in two of its schools. For the School of the Arts, he teaches courses in Lab in the Video Essay and in Coding for Media Studies. For the School of Engineering and Applied Science, he teaches AI in Practice: Game Design and Development. 

He has given workshops at the Locarno Film Festivals on archives, the politics of time, and AI & memory, and part of Agnés Varda "The Gleaners and I" project with Cine-Tamaris. His critical and creative work has been recognized by the National Gallery of Art and The New York Times, and he was awarded a patent for interactive applications. He has an essay on the pharmacology of AI in a forthcoming book titled, "The Future of Reality" (2026).