Niki Selken (she/her) is a new media artist, curator and technologist. She manages the tech culture programs at Intuit and is board chairperson at Gray Area. Niki spent over a decade working across game design, physical computing, experimental theater, interaction design and education. As a designer and technologist, Niki focused on working with nonprofits in the inclusion and social and art impact space such as Goethe Institute, Buckminster Fuller Institute, and Leonardo. She is a pioneer in the blockchain and NFT space, helping artists learn how to engage with the latest technologies and monetize their art. She has designed immersive experiences for tech industry leaders such as Apple, Google, and Intuit.  A graduate of Parsons School of Design, Niki has taught at her alma mater, at St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn, at the University of San Francisco, at the Bay Area Video Collective and others. Niki is considered one of the foremost Emoji experts in the world and has earned global recognition for her emoji work as well as her gaming and wearables projects. She founded the Emoji Foundation, created the Emoji Dictionary, and VR game EmojiFlower VR. Niki is the co-founder of the  Emoji Foundation, an organization that promotes, explores, and translates the written word into the pictorial alphabet of Emoji. Niki's work has been featured by Yahoo Tech, CBS, Make Magazine, Wired, San Francisco Examiner, and Adafruit, among others. Niki identifies as Latina and hails from a long line of Mexican artists and craftsmen.

Her game, Find Maria Rivera, exhibited at Indiecade and was selected as an Indiecade Award Finalist. And her Augmented Reality platform, Wayscape, earned her recognition as a Kill Screen game design scholar and a Parsons E-Lab fellow. Niki is a global finalist and a NASA Space Apps  winner for her wearable tech project, Senti8. She has performed and/or worked with Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The San Jose Stage Company, Yerba Buena Center for Performing Arts, Counterpulse Theater, and United Broadcasting Theater Company among others. In 2007 Niki founded the theater company, Ko Labs, which presented The Endless Frontier at the 2008 San Francisco Fringe Festival and at the 2009 Women on the Way Festival.