María Laura Ruggiero works at the intersection of cinema, immersive media, and narrative research. Her practice explores how stories are experienced when they move beyond the frame—into spaces, systems, bodies, and collective perception.

Her work spans film, virtual and extended realities, live performance, and hybrid formats, with a focus on worldbuilding, speculative futures, and the habitability of immersive environments. She approaches storytelling as a lived process: something that is inhabited, remembered, and shaped through presence rather than explanation.

Practice

María Laura’s work combines artistic creation, research, and education. She designs narrative systems for immersive and hybrid experiences, develops experimental frameworks for storytelling in XR, and collaborates with institutions, labs, and cultural organizations internationally.

Her practice is informed by ongoing PhD research in Immersive Design, where she investigates the relationship between narrative, embodiment, and virtual space, and by years of work across documentary, installation, and experiential formats.

Current & Recent Contexts

Her work circulates across international festivals, research labs, and academic settings. Recent and ongoing contexts include MIT (MIT Reality Hack and Experiential), Berlinale Talents, and collaborations at the intersection of performing arts, science, and technology.

In 2025, she collaborated with La Fura dels Baus in Barcelona as part of the European Performing Science Night, contributing to the performance PosidonIA, where narrative design, spatial dramaturgy, and technological systems were explored within a live, performative context.

Selected Roles & Initiatives

She is the founder and director of SeirenFilms, a narrative design lab focused on hybrid storytelling and emerging media, and leads StoryHackers, a nomadic narrative experimentation lab activated in hackathons, academic labs, and festival contexts.

She regularly works as a speaker, mentor, and jury member, contributing to educational programs, artistic research, and the development of new narrative formats.

Upcoming

In January 2026, María Laura Ruggiero will speak at MIT Experiential in Boston, USA, with the talk
Extended Realities: Dreaming as a Design Framework,
and will also participate as a judge at the MIT Reality Hack.

Selected Projects

Her projects include Wave 201: The Unwanted Atlantis, The Library of All Possible Things, Aplysia, and other film, immersive, and installation-based works exploring memory, ecology, science, and speculative imaginaries.