Jury for the IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction

Blake Kammerdiener is Senior Manager of Film & TV & XR Programming at SXSW. He has been working for SXSW in different capacities since 2005, starting as a volunteer and going on to work production for the event's Film Festival in 2010. Kammerdiener began programming immersive content when SXSW started the VR/AR track for its 2015 conference and experimented with immersive exhibition at the event. Following the 2016 edition he became the XR Programmer and started the immersive exhibition and the XR Experience. He has led the conference's XR programming since then. Kammerdiener also programs feature film and TV for the Film & TV Festival.

Natalie Paneng is a Johannesburg-based digital fairy and transmedia artist whose practice flutters across four connected strands: research, world-building, performance, and speculative technological prototyping. Working across IRL and virtual environments, she constructs speculative systems, spaces and narratives that examine how subjectivity, perception, and technology are produced and experienced—often positioning avatars of herself within the work.

Paneng’s work in immersive and creative technology has been developed and expressed across research, festival, and museum contexts. She has conducted research through notable residencies, including Gasworks in London and Studio Quantum with V2_Lab for Unstable Media, where she later shared her findings through the Studio Quantum Symposium at Haus der Kulturen der Welt,  CIVA festival, and at V2_Lab. In 2025, her art was presented at international museums namely Belvedere 21, ArkDes Sweden, Kunsthall Bremen and MUNCH Museum. Paneng’s work has appeared at leading digital art festivals such as MUTEK Montréal, KIKK Festival,CIVA Fak’ugesi, ART*VR, and IDFA, where in 2023 her VR project Natalie’s Trifecta received the DocLab Special Jury Prize for Creative Technology. Across these spaces, her work aims to share intuitive and accessible metaphors for complex systems.

Roel Wouters is a director, designer, and educator working at the intersection of art, film, and technology. As co-founder of experimental design collective Moniker (2012–2023), he developed installations, participatory systems, and moving image works for cultural institutions and technology partners. His practice centers on constructed situations: sets of rules and constraints that generate form, often revealing that which makes us human. As a director, his credits include Deep Soup (with Luna Maurer), Hot Chip’s One Life Stand, and a VR project for LCD Soundsystem (with Jonathan Puckey). Their interactive music video Do Not Touch became a widely referenced example of participatory cinema. Treating the browser as a performative space, projects such as clickclickclick.click, Do Not Draw a Penis, and The Puff Up Club turn users into active agents. In 2023 he co-authored Designing Friction, advocating for greater resistance within digital culture. In 2024 and 2025, Wouters led the Creative Research Lab at Random Studio, dedicated to experimenting with spatial AI, computer vision and immersive systems. Since 2026 he heads studio Melting Realities at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. Each project he pursues is informed by his curiosity towards the relational tension between the formal structures humans create and the reality of an unpredictable, chaotic world.