Storyliving the Future - How Immersive Experiences Reshape How We Connect

As technology blurs the boundaries between physical and digital space, storytelling is becoming storyliving. In immersive environments, audiences no longer observe — they participate. The session explores how experiential design, spatial storytelling, and emerging technologies are redefining how we gather, connect, and imagine together, engaging all senses and triggering emotions such as empathy. In an era of rapid change, shared experience becomes cultural infrastructure for the next frontier.

Featuring Jasmin Jodry (Emmy award winning Creative Director), Stephanie Riggs (CEO & Co-Founder, Nia. Experience Innovator), Randy Weiner (Playwright and Producer - Masquerade, Sleep No More), and Erica Boecke (Founder, Liberty & Co. and Creator of XP Land)

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Location: Spacious Studio 1, 873 Broadway, Second Floor, NY, NY 10003

Jasmin Jodry is an award-winning Executive Creative Director specializing in immersive experience design. Based in New York, she creates Storyliving Experiences that transport participants into themed worlds to connect, create lasting memories, and spark transformation.

With over 20 years of experience in innovation-led design across the US and Europe, she develops original IP and spatializes existing IP in location-based entertainment, collaborating with clients across entertainment, culture, tech, luxury, and wellness.

Jasmin leads teams in crafting immersive storyworlds that integrate storytelling, world building, performance, technology, and game mechanics. She designs shared experiences that foster community, well-being, and cultural inspiration, making the impossible possible.

Stephanie Riggs works at the intersection of storytelling and emerging technology, developing projects across theatre, themed entertainment, film, immersive media, and experiential environments for more than twenty-five years.

She began her career as a Disney Imagineer and later served as Experiential Creative Director for Refinery29/Vice Media. Her work has included augmented and virtual reality experiences, immersive installations, and spatial narrative environments developed with creative studios, technology labs, and research institutions. Her projects and research collaborations have involved organizations such as Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, NYU’s Future Reality Lab, and Yale, where she co-founded the Blended Reality Lab.

Riggs speaks internationally at conferences and industry gatherings including SXSW, SIGGRAPH, IEEE, AWE and Frankfurter Buchmesse, and regularly guest lectures at institutions such as Harvard, Yale, USC, Carnegie Mellon, and NYU.

She is the author of The End of Storytelling: The Future of Narrative in the Storyplex, which reached #1 on Amazon’s Virtual Reality category and is listed among the Best Mixed Reality Books of All Time and the 100 Best Selling Augmented Reality Books of All Time by BookAuthority. Her latest book, Quantum Narratives, continues her exploration of narrative and experience in emerging media.

Riggs studied directing at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama while simultaneously earning a degree in Human–Computer Interaction from the School of Computer Science. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and an Andrew Carnegie Society Scholar.

Randy Weiner is a producer, venue owner, and playwright hailed by The New York Times as “the leading impresario of non-traditional theatre in New York” and described by The Wall Street Journal as “a mad genius of nightlife.” He is the recipient of two Drama Desk Awards as the producer of Sleep No More and Queen of the Night.

In partnership with Lloyd Webber Entertainment and Brookfield Properties, Weiner is the creator and producer of Masquerade, the immersive production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, the longest running Broadway musical of all time.

Weiner is a founder and partner of Outside The Box Amusements (OTBA), a production company known for creating large-scale, immersive live entertainment projects, including Come Alive! The Greatest Showman Circus Spectacular in London’s West End and Usher’s acclaimed My Way Las Vegas residency.

Weiner also co-created and is a managing partner of the groundbreaking theatre-nightclub The Box with Simon Hammerstein and Richard Kimmel, launching first in New York and later in London.

Erica Boeke has always been a gatherer. Born in Pittsburgh (Steeler Country), she grew up around sports and stories. Her first job was writing for the San Francisco Giants magazine before earning her master’s degree in journalism. From there, she moved to the business side of media, taking on brand strategy roles at Condé Nast and Fast Company — where she eventually found her true medium: experiences.

Over the past two decades, she has helped create some of the most influential brand and cultural gatherings in media, from the Fast Company Innovation Festival to the WIRED Store, and from the Architectural Digest Oscar Greenroom to the Teen Vogue Summit. Along the way, she developed a reputation for building rooms where ideas, industries, and unlikely collaborators collide.

Today she runs XP Land, a platform dedicated to defining and elevating the experiential industry, and Liberty & Co., an editorial-first consultancy focused on transformative experiences.

She still loves baseball, once spent a summer ushering minor league games with her father— a story later optioned for television — and holds onto a dream that is both improbable and entirely sincere: to one day become the first woman to buy a minor league baseball team.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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