Catie Cuan

Dr. Catie Cuan is an artist, engineer and award-winning robot choreographer whose work explores the beauty, magic and unintended consequences of giving artificial intelligence a robot body. A pioneer in the nascent field of ‘choreorobotics,’ she works at the intersection of AI, human-robot interaction, and art.

Dr. Cuan holds a PhD and Master’s of Science in robotics and AI from Stanford, where she is also a postdoc leading the art and robotics efforts at the new Stanford Robotics Center. Her PhD thesis was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Google, and Stanford University. During her PhD, she led the first multi-robot machine learning project at Everyday Robots (Google X) and Robotics at Google (now a part of Google Deepmind).

Dr. Cuan has held artistic residencies at the Smithsonian, the Exploratorium, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Everyday Robots (Google X), TED, and ThoughtWorks Arts. She has created works with nearly a dozen different robots, from a massive ABB IRB 6700 industrial robot to a tabletop IDEO + Moooi robot. In "Breathless: Catie and the Robot," a modern retelling of the American workday, she danced with a robot in New York for eight straight hours.

Dr. Cuan is also the CEO of consumer AI startup Zenie, an artist-in-residence at the San Francisco Exploratorium and an International Strategy Forum (ISF) fellow at Schmidt Futures as well as a TED Global 2024 speaker.