MaryAnn Talavera is an award-winning, Dominican-American creative technologist, filmmaker, and educator. MaryAnn is the Assistant Director of the Martin Scorsese Center for Virtual Production at NYU Tisch. She has taught XR world-building at the New School, and virtual production for the Screen Industry Training Hub (SITHub). Her work was featured at Cultural DC’s Torrents Exhibition, the Umbrella Art Fair, AWE, the Harlem Fine Arts Show, and at Onassis ONX Studio during the Tribeca Film Festival and Games for Change showcases. She was a 2024 BPM+ Fellow and Artist-in-Residence at Barnard College’s Movement Lab. MaryAnn studied XR and virtual production at ITP. She is a producer, designer, and lead developer for Mannahatta 2100, an AR project that recently won two awards at the 2026 MIT Reality Hackathon. MaryAnn is passionate about using XR and emerging media for social good, crafting stories with cultural significance.