Savannah Niles is a multi-disciplinary product and design leader with 9 years experience working in XR and immersive experiences. She currently leads design for VR Trust at Meta, focusing on all things identity, privacy, integrity, youth + families for the Quest platform. 

Previously, she led product experience and design at Magnopus, building tools for studios and brands to create AR and Metaverse experiences, as easily as creating a website. She was  the Director of Interaction Design and Product Experience at Magic Leap, a Florida-based augmented reality startup with $3 billion in funding. For 6 years at Magic Leap, Savannah designed, prototyped, and shipped a wide range of hardware and software products, with 20+ patent applications and grants. She contributed significantly to the launch of the Magic Leap 1 as a multidisciplinary leader across design and product roles. 

Savannah graduated in 2015 with her Master's from the Media Lab at MIT, where she received full funding in Dr. Andy Lippman's Viral Spaces group. There, she researched mobile diagnostics, maternal health technology, and new media in visual journalism. She developed her thesis on techniques for generating expressive and evocative video excerpts for emerging interfaces, such as XR and ambient displays.

Savannah designed interactive experiences for  Walt Disney Imagineering and Twitter. She graduated summa cum laude from SMU in May 2013 with degrees in sculpture (BFA) and creative computation (BA). 

She serves on the board at Filmgate Miami, a not-for-profit production studio, supporting innovative storytellers who craft independent narratives. In that role she supports the annual FilmGate Interactive, the first festival in the U.S. to solely showcase interactive and immersive stories, as well as the technology that supports them. 

She has served as a juror at SIGGRAPH for 4 years, and has been honored to speak at a number of XR-industry events, including the keynotes for MUTEK, Laval Virtual, IEEE VR, and the World Usability Congress. 

She splits her time between LA and Miami. 🌴

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