Immersive Storytelling with Maya Georgieva
The Immersive Storytelling course explores how narrative evolves through spatial computing, interactivity, embodiment, and emerging technologies. Students develop immersive experiences that move beyond traditional linear storytelling into participatory worlds shaped by audience agency, perception, environment, sound, and interaction. Throughout the semester, students experiment with virtual reality, augmented reality, projection mapping, sonic storytelling, AI-assisted systems, and interactive narrative design while examining the cultural, ethical, and social dimensions of immersive media.
The Immersive Storytelling Festival serves as the culminating public exhibition of the course, transforming the Innovation Center into a live experimental showcase of student work. Rather than presenting static projects, students create fully realized experiences that invite audiences to enter, navigate, and engage with speculative worlds, emotional environments, and interactive systems. The festival highlights interdisciplinary approaches to storytelling and creative technology while creating a platform for experimentation, collaboration, and public dialogue around the future of immersive media.
Created and curated by Maya Georgieva, the festival celebrates the work of emerging creators exploring the future of storytelling through experimentation, participation, embodiment, and new forms of narrative shaped by evolving technologies and audience interaction.
The Immersive Storytelling course
Stories have always kept their audiences at a distance. This course ends that. What if the story knew you were there? Immersive Storytelling explores the future of narrative in a world where physical, virtual, and algorithmic realities increasingly intersect. As media moves beyond the frame of the screen, storytelling shifts from observation to participation. Immersive narratives invite audiences to cross narrative thresholds – to step inside stories, navigate worlds, and experience meaning through presence, interaction, and embodied engagement. Worldbuilding is at the heart of this course: the creation of narrative environments and living story systems with their own internal logic, worlds that participants can inhabit, navigate, and influence.
Drawing from theatre, film, interactive media, installation art, performance, architecture, fashion, and emerging technologies, students investigate how stories unfold across environments rather than linear timelines, and how space, interaction, image, and sonic storytelling combine to produce experiences where the boundary between narrative and world dissolves. Working across spatial XR worlds, augmented reality embedded in the city, participatory installations, and performance as interface, students develop a conceptual and creative language for designing immersive narrative systems shaped by perception, agency, embodiment, and world logic. Rather than mastering a single tool, students become spatial narrative designers – equipped to imagine and build experiences that could not exist without the people inside them.
The course also confronts artificial intelligence not as a technology to celebrate or dismiss, but as a force reshaping the fundamental conditions of narrative: who authors a story, what agency a participant holds, and whether a story can exist without a human hand behind it. These are not abstract questions. What happens to authorship when a story cannot begin without its audience? What worlds become possible when experience itself becomes the medium? What stories will you choose to tell – and who might be transformed by entering them?
Students must register for both the lecture and discussion section here
The Immersive Storytelling Festival
The Immersive Storytelling Festival extends our work into a live public-facing environment where student projects move beyond presentation and become fully embodied experiences. Developed as an extension of both the Immersive Storytelling course and the Innovation Center’s XR and AI Labs, the festival transforms the 6th floor into an experimental exhibition space for virtual worlds, augmented reality, projection mapping, sonic environments, and interactive narrative systems.
The festival functions as a testing ground for emerging forms of narrative and experiential design—bringing together research, creative practice, technology, and public engagement while giving students the opportunity to present their work to peers, faculty, guests, and the broader creative technology community
Created and curated by Maya Georgieva, the festival celebrates the work of emerging creators exploring the future of storytelling through experimentation, participation, embodiment, and new forms of narrative shaped by evolving technologies and audience interaction. Bringing together design, art, technology, sound, performance, and spatial experience, the festival functions as both an exhibition and a living laboratory for immersive media. It creates a space where students test how stories can be felt, navigated, influenced, and experienced collectively—challenging traditional boundaries between creator, audience, and environment while exploring new possibilities for communication, emotional connection, and worldbuilding in an increasingly immersive future.
The Immersive Storytelling Teaching Assistants
The Immersive Storytelling course is supported by a team of graduate teaching assistants. Working closely with Maya Georgieva, the teaching assistants help guide students through prototyping and production workflows. Many of the teaching assistants come from the MFA Design and Technology program and have served for multiple semesters, bringing continuity, technical knowledge, and firsthand experience with the course’s evolving creative and experimental approaches to immersive storytelling.
