María Laura Ruggiero
María Laura Ruggiero
María Laura Ruggiero is an Argentine filmmaker, narrative designer, and immersive media researcher whose work unfolds at the intersection of film, extended realities, and experimental storytelling. Her practice explores how narratives are inhabited, enacted, and experienced when they move beyond traditional frames into spatial, embodied, and hybrid conditions.
Ruggiero’s work spans cinematic, immersive, and performance contexts, with particular focus on worldbuilding, speculative futures, and the habitability of virtual and mixed spaces. She combines artistic creation with research-oriented inquiry, advancing new methods of storytelling that foreground presence, attention, and collective experience.
Her projects and collaborations have been featured in international programs and forums, including MIT Reality Hack, Berlinale Talents, SXSW, ONA, and European Performing Science Night. In Barcelona she collaborated with La Fura dels Baus on the performance PosidonIA, engaging narrative design within live performative and technological ecosystems. Her project Wave 201: The Unwanted Atlantis was part of MIT’s Cocreation Studio Worlding initiative.
Ruggiero leads SeirenFilms, a narrative design lab devoted to hybrid storytelling and emerging media, and is a principal facilitator of StoryHackers, a narrative experimentation lab activated in hackathons, academic labs, and festival contexts. She regularly contributes to educational programs and serves as mentor, instructor, and judge in international research and experiential events.
She holds awards and fellowships from institutions including the National Endowment for the Arts, British Council, and Digital Jove Spain, and has been recognized as a Berlinale Talents alumna, NATPE Diversity Fellow, and Jihlava Emerging Producer. She is currently completing a PhD in Immersive Design at UBA-FADU and participates in the XR Design Virtual Reality Fellowship
A.KA. Domar Huracanes
María Laura also goes by Domar Huracanes (Taming Hurricanes) — a moniker that evokes her love for storms, extreme weather, and the unpredictable edges of experience. As an image and sound designer, virtual explorer, and field guide of #StoryHackers, she navigates the liminal spaces where narrative, technology, and collective presence intersect.
She is a lifelong space geek with a deep fascination for astronomy and exploration. Design, architecture, surfing, and sustainability animate her curiosity, while wilderness — both the ocean and the desert — feels like home. She practices yoga and meditation, delights in Borgesian labyrinths, and is endlessly captivated by Elvis Presley and bioluminescent phenomena beneath the waves.
A freediving apprentice, she moves easily between film sets, labs, hackathons, and open water alike. Mythologies, hybrid beings, cyberpunk, Bauhaus, California landscapes, and photographs of alpacas make her happy. She unapologetically loves Brit Marling and low-fi science fiction.
For María Laura, poetry and pixels are in constant dialogue — each informing the other. She creates, designs, and writes constantly, often in Buenos Aires but always with her imagination wandering toward California redwoods and crystal-clear shores.
She’s always writing something.
