Genel Ambrose is a strategist, cultural producer and founder of Good Mirrors Institute, a social practice studio and cultural R&D consultancy rooted in the belief that creativity, community, and collective memory are practices that help expand human potential. Good Mirrors studies these practices and builds art and technology-driven platforms to transmit and preserve them.
Genel's work is guided by three questions:
What shapes and impacts our ability to reach our full potential? What can we learn about what it means to thrive from communities who have had to practice it most deliberately? What becomes possible when art and technology are used in service of human potential?
Over the past seven years, Genel has translated this inquiry into artifacts, exhibitions, storytelling platforms, and research tools.
(Good Mirrors launched in 2018 featuring photographers Ming Smith and Delphine Diallo in conversation. Moderated by Dani Kwateng.)
(Genel created Mirror Work affirmation card deck inspired by the wisdom of Black women.)
She has collaborated with brands such as Unilever's SheaMoisture to amplify Black women's stories and provide grant opportunities to Black women artists around the US.
Genel is the co-curator, alongside Tina Knowles, of WITNESS, an immersive visual arts exhibition and national tour in partnership with Black Women Photographers, supported by Melinda French Gates' Pivotal Ventures.
(Above: Opening night of WITNESS Los Angeles. Ms. Tina, Genel and the phenomenal artists.)
(Above, WITNESS LA coverage in the Los Angeles Times. Below, WITNESS in Overtown, Miami during Art Basel.)
(Above, students from Spelman and Morris Brown Colleges visit WITNESS@TedWomen in Atlanta. Below, Princeton Professor Ruha Benjamin and filmmaker Ava Duvernay visit WITNESS.)
She is the creator of TRUTHPortal.xyz, a 2022 Mozilla Global Creative Media Award-winning interactive platform and installation that collects and transmits stories by Black women to combat algorithmic bias.
Genel is the architect of Good Mirrors Index. She believes technology plays a critical role in preserving memory and shaping identity, perspective and well-being. She created Good Mirrors Index to demonstrate what's possible when technology is built with care, empathy, and equity, modeling in the present the future she intends to help create.
Before founding Good Mirrors, Genel spent six years as Head of Programming at Apple, where she built and scaled large-scale cultural programs across the United States and Mexico City, and six years at VICE Media as a Creative Strategist and Chief of Staff. Her honors and affiliations include a Mozilla Alumni Connection Grant, a SEED Grant from New Museum x Meta Open Arts, residencies at The Laundromat Project and Montalvo Arts Center, and a collaborative AI project with Stephanie Dinkins at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She has presented her work at NYU Black Portraiture[s], the New Museum, among others.
Genel holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from The New School and a BA in Journalism and Sociology from NYU. She is a mom of three girls, an alum of the Jackie Robinson Foundation and a member of New Museum incubator, New Inc.
