Catie Cuan

Artist, Engineer, Entrepreneur, Explorer, Performer

An entrepreneur, engineer, and artist, Dr. Catie Cuan is a pioneer in the nascent field of ‘choreorobotics’ and works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and art. She is the founder and CEO of Zenie, a consumer AI company, backed by Gradient Ventures and HF0. Catie 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. 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). She has held artistic residencies at the Smithsonian, the Exploratorium, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Everyday Robots (Google X), TED, the RAD Lab, and ThoughtWorks Arts. Catie is a prolific and award-winning robot choreographer, having created works with nearly a dozen different robots, from a massive ABB IRB 6700 industrial robot to a tabletop IDEO + Moooi robot. Her work as been featured in the New York Times, WIRED, the San Francisco Chronicle, Scientific American, and on the PBS NewsHour. She spoke on the main stage at TED2024 and is a sought-after speaker, appearing at conferences and special lectures at SXSW, Apple, Pinterest, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and many others.

Choreographers and roboticists have much in common and can learn from one another.

artificial intelligence, choreography, dance, robot learning, robotics, theater