Kimon Keramidas is a digital content and systems specialist, academic, cultural heritage professional, and thought leader. He has over twenty years of experience bringing innovation to and collaborating with organizations around the world to help them tell their stories, reach their audiences, and achieve their goals.

Kimon is currently Head of Digital Content and Strategy at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, which promotes understanding of the ideas, cultures, and art of Himalayan regions. At the Rubin Kimon, is responsible for crafting an intentional storytelling-driven digital visitor experience and developing a digital content strategy, editorial mission, and voice for the museum. He leads the Editorial and Digital Content team and works collaboratively with partner institutions and departments across the museum to develop written, audio, video, and interactive content including the Webby award-winning AWAKEN podcast, video series collaboration with Smarthistory, Spiral magazine, audio guides, image annotations, exhibition interactives, and a wide range of other multimedia projects.

Kimon recently led a comprehensive redesign of the Rubin’s website. This redesign included the development of a new multimedia content stream called Spiral, developed out of our existing magazine, a complete reimagining of the museum’s online collection, new branding, and complex design schemas that bring together collection, exhibitions, collaborations, and editorial content.

Kimon also oversaw the development of the digital portion of Project Himalayan Art, the Rubin’s transmedia project that includes a publication, traveling exhibition, and digital platform for students, educators, and the public to learn about Himalayan art and culture. Kimon continues to lead development of content and oversee design changes for the digital platform, which includes object essays, a digital exhibition, thematic essays, and maps that use rich text, audio, video, geolocation, and interactive annotation materials.

Before the Rubin, Kimon was an Associate Professor of Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement and Affiliated Faculty in the International Relations and Integrated Design and Media programs at NYU and Assistant Professor and Director of the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center. Kimon’s research and pedagogy take place at the intersection of media and technology studies, social engagement, cultural history, and digital humanities. Through the lenses of political economy and the sociology of culture, Kimon approaches media and technology from an interdisciplinary perspective that unpacks complex micro-and macro-scale concerns in a way that makes the impact of technology on our lives more apparent at the global, local, and personal levels. The goal of this work is to encourage individuals to develop a more comprehensive literacy of how the hardware and software experiences of our digital culture influence the ways in which we work, play, learn and communicate as a society.

Kimon’s research and teaching consider digital tools not only as objects of study but also as a means for performing research and scholarship. He does through a practice-based approach which involves projects and collaborations to bring academic study into real-world situations. In this mode, he helped establish the BGC as a leader in digital initiatives in the scholarship of material culture and interactive exhibition design. He is active in the fields of digital humanities and interactive technology and pedagogy and has taught courses in digital humanities, interface design, media and materiality, artifacts in the age of new media, digital information fluency, and theatre design, performance and technology at the NYU, the Bard Graduate Center, Marymount Manhattan College, the CUNY Online Baccalaureate, and The Cooper Union.

As a curator, Kimon completed The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing while at the Bard Graduate Center. This transmediated exhibition/book/digital experience focused on some of the most ubiquitous objects in the history of personal computing, including the Commodore 64, Macintosh, Palm Pilot, and iPad. Tactile and interactive displays offered visitors a unique opportunity to gain a better understanding of the history of the design and material experience of computers, while the website provided expanded information aimed at stimulating personal questions about how interaction with these devices has influenced each of our lives. The project’s book won the Innovation in Print Design award from the American Alliance of Museums.

Kimon’s was also co-curator of the digital exhibition The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads. This digital global art history project investigated the story of the Sogdians, a Central Asian people from the Middle Ages who helped solidify what we today call the Silk Roads. In the exhibition, interactive maps, 3-D models of metalwork objects, photographs of archaeological sites, and international scholarship reveal new details about these forgotten people.

Kimon served as director or co-director of several initiatives inculding the International DH Research Center at ITMO University in St. Petersburg, Russia, OutHistory, org, and the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. He also helped found The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and co-founded and is on the steering committee of New York City Digital Humanities. Other collaborations include work with the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art (formerly the Freer|Sackler), the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the University of Leicester, and NYU Abu Dhabi and Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. Kimon is also co-founder of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and New York City Digital Humanities (NYCDH).

Kimon holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.