BIO + WORK
Rachel Joy Victor is a designer, strategist and worldbuilder, working with emergent technologies and mediums (XR/AI/web3) to create cohesive narrative, brand, and product experiences. She designs for a range of applications: from multiplatform narratives and immersive experiences, to tools and platforms, to spaces and cities. Rachel draws from her education in computational neuroscience and spatial economics to facilitate the creation of data-informed emergent experience where world affordances and individual agency intersect.
Her clients have included Disney, HBO, Vans, Ford, Nike, Havas, Meow Wolf, Niantic, and more. Rachel is passionate about offering a more complete picture of the considerations of design for our new reality, and has led executive education sessions at Activision, Unilever Prestige, WB/Sony/NBCU, Technicolor, UGGs, Crocs, and Red Bull, and been a speaker at SXSW, Infinity Festival, NAB Show, Future of Film Fest, and more.
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Cofounder and Chief Design Officer at FBRC.ai
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Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, teaching CNTV 499 on Implications of AI on Narrative (Fall 2024, projected Fall 2025)
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Independent XR Distribution Coalition Advisory Board Member
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UT-Austin 2024-2025 Explorer-in-Residence
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Advisor to Startups: Creative Aya, Mod Tech Labs, Playbook, AIFX Studios, Viira, Emergentic.ai
Resident with Museum of Shangri-La
Emerging Technology x Story Residency
Residency project mapping how emerging technologies intersect with cultural heritage and storytelling in the context of the Museum of Shangri-La's archives. Developed proposals on how to align stakeholder needs around accessibility while reinventing archival materials using emerging technologies. Proposals mapped the intersection between Islamic pattern systems, and computational design as a future-facing installation framework.
Creative Director
Boundaries of Humanity
A speculative research and storytelling project translating research from Stanford's Boundaries of Humanity Lab into a multimedia, publicly accessible deliverable. In addition to designing a coffee table takeaway for a BoH conference and developing a website platform, the first drop of content focused on enhanced athletes as a lens to explore human augmentation and its trade-offs. The content drop included a comic book, illustrated modern adaptation of Frankenstein, and three in-depth researched articles.
Facilitator Lead
Home Music Center
A site-specific immersive performance exploring the future of downtown Los Angeles. Designed narrative and spatial elements that fused community voices, music, and speculative storytelling to reimagine cultural infrastructure.
Worldbuilding + Interaction Design Lead
BBL Drizzy Musical
An interactive hip-hop musical blending live performance with participatory design mechanics. Collaborated as an interactive design advisor to craft playful systems where audiences influence the arc of a satirical narrative.
Co-founder and CTO of FBRC.ai, Partners with ETC
Pathways and The Bends
Partnered with ETC to advise and co-produce experimental short-form projects exploring narrative production with AI and virtual production pipelines.
Co-founder and CTO of FBRC.ai
AI Studio Report
An industry report mapping the evolution of AI creators and production workflows, exploring how automation and human creativity intersect. The report highlights emerging roles, tools, and business models reshaping the creative economy, and was featured by Forbes, Deadline, Variety, and more.
Co-founder and CTO of FBRC.ai
Amazon MGM Studios
Led strategic prototyping and experimentation with Amazon MGM Studios to explore AI-native production workflows. Was the studio's dedicated technical advisor across multiple workstreams, centered around aligning stakeholder needs cross-organization with achieving tangible technical learnings. The engagements emphasized scaling creative ambition, identifying pipeline efficiencies, and aligning AI experiments with studio storytelling goals.
Co-founder and CTO of FBRC.ai, Partners with ETC
BGSTR*
Welcome visitors to your site with a short, engaging introduction.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai
BBC
A creative incubator program designed with the BBC to support directors experimenting with AI across narrative and technical workflows. The initiative emphasized surfacing unique insights about the ways that AI usage could generalize to future large-scale productions.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai
Culver Cup
Competition
A competition designed in partnership with AWS Startups that set a standard for what quality AI-generated content could look like. The event emphasized both storytelling creativity and technical innovation in AI-enabled pipelines.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai
AI on the Lot
A full-day industry event created to make AI and production accessible, featuring panels, demos, and startup showcases. The program positioned FBRC.ai as a central hub for innovation at the intersection of Hollywood and emerging technology.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai
NAB PropelME
Partnership with NAB Show to curate startups and lead programming in the “PropelME” startup corridor. The showcase brought AI creators and production tools directly into the broadcast and entertainment industry’s biggest marketplace.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai
Creative Control Hackathon
A hackathon uniting creatives and AI startups to build custom workflows for Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Legato’s next project. Winning teams entered a structured incubator to refine their prototypes into production-ready pipelines.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai
PromptBattle @ NABShow
A live, interactive competition where participants showcased their ability to generate compelling media using prompts. Designed as both entertainment and education, the battle spotlighted the artistry and speed of prompt-driven creation. Designed and hosted in collaboration with Curious Refuge.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai
Cinema Synthetica Competition
A 48-hour film challenge bringing together leading AI Filmmakers to experiment with rapid creation and checkpoint the possibilities with existing AI tools. The event was sponsored by Adobe, Runway, and more.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai with Verizon
"At the Edge of AI" Series
An event series spotlighting cutting-edge AI applications at the intersection of connectivity and media and entertainment. The sessions explored themes from live event editing to asset metadata, blending industry expertise with startup innovation.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai
Startup Showcase
A showcase of AI startups curated for Hollywood studios and partners--including Paramount, . The Showcase connected early-stage companies with industry leaders, while highlighting their role within production pipelines. The “product–pipeline fit” event was featured at AI on the Lot and NAB Show.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai
"No Man's Land" Series
A salon-style series convening female and non-binary leaders in emerging technology. The program created space for community, collaboration, and visibility in shaping the future of creative tech.
Co-founder + CTO, FBRC.ai
Control with AI Workflows
A high-profile session at the HPA Tech Retreat demonstrating how AI can compress production workflows. Creators completed tasks in a live demonstration across the course of one day of the conference. They then presented their workflow results that showcased how they compressed production tasks that would traditionally take multiple days into a single day.
Dramaturg with Annie Saunders + Andrew Schneider
Rest
Served as dramaturge for an immersive light-and-sound performance installation exploring the thresholds of perception. Helped shape narrative resonance and thematic layering for audiences navigating a sensorial, non-verbal experience.
Independent Consultant
Niantic Punchdrunk
Designed narrative systems and mechanics for an alternate reality game. The experience integrated live performance with geolocated gameplay and included an exploration of replicable foundational design systems.
Writer
"Local Futures"
An illustrated futures toolkit designed to help communities anchor speculative exploration in local placemaking. The piece combined visual frameworks with practical methodologies, offering accessible tools for mapping trends, identifying inflection points, and translating global futures thinking into grounded community strategies. Developed for "Defy Apathy" zine.
Independent Consultant
"Design Principles for Web3"
Developing underlying design principles for Web3 as it intersects with physical realities. Exploring the different categories of experience design across the Spatial Web and the Metaverse, the affordances of physical versus virtual
spatial worlds, data and information translation as enabled through interfaces and interaction, the nature of identity and avatars, cognitive architectures for building responsive systems, and infrastructural needs of Web3 as it intersects with broader world systems.
Independent Consultant
"The Limits of Creative AI"
A workshop exploring the boundaries of human agency and machine autonomy in creative practice. Through hands-on experimentation and discussion, participants engaged with AI tools to examine where control is amplified, surrendered, or transformed—and what that means for future workflows in art and design. Presented at Otis College of Design, USC, LA Design Festival, DCN Generative AI Summit in Mumbai, and more.
Head of Design, Open Innovation Studio, AILA
Hack for Hope
Designed and co-led civic hackathon applying AI and design to social impact challenges, focused on the use of spatial mapping technologies to track pests affecting trees at scale with LA County. Created a hackathon curricula centered around "Designing Complex Solutions," to explore the relationship between problem space definition and product design, and representations of user needs across personas, stories, and systems diagrams.
Lead Researcher + Narrative Designer, Collective Futures
SoCal Life Sciences Hub
Facilitated a speculative worldbuilding process for stakeholders across Southern California’s life sciences ecosystem. Coordinated with AI LA to map stakeholder neds, identify future innovation trajectories, and build shared narratives to align the hub’s strategy.
Independent Consultant
"Narrative Design Across Mediums"
Mapped narrative affordances of various mediums, from games and comics, to plays and virtual reality. Explored ways to build nonlinear narratives, from role creation for participants to mechanics of engagement and principles for persistent transmedia storytelling across franchise storyworlds.
Independent Consultant
"Worldbuilding Futures"
An interactive workshop teaching worldbuilding as a design methodology for futures thinking, focused on the way that systems thinking provides a useful lens to understand the secondary and tertiary effects of emerging technologies and trends.
Independent Consultant
"Worldbuilding Franchises"
A deep dive into how worldbuilding methodologies can scale into multi-platform franchises. The talk outlined principles for building narrative architectures, designing participatory ecosystems, and creating long-term engagement across mediums. Presented at...
Independent Consultant, Assorted
"Computational Experience"
Designed frameworks and pattern languages for building responsive systems for user interaction in immersive worlds and ambient computing contexts. Developed systems for building procedural and responsive worlds. Drew from research on the neuroscience of empathy, affective computing, embodied cognition, and spatial presence, while cross-referencing with studies from social science, media research, and other relevant disciplines.
BMW, Characters
Independent Consultant with Future Commerce
"Brands in the Age of Computational Reality"
This talk and article for Future Commerce explored how brands exist not just as stories but as computational entities—living systems that evolve through data, algorithms, and collective imagination. Framing AI as both mirror and engine of cultural meaning, it considers how identity is reshaped in machine-mediated environments. For strategists and brand leaders, it translated these abstract shifts into actionable approaches for designing responsive brand architectures.
Independent Consultant
"Creative Production Pathways"
A workshop with ASU and Worlds in Play to help creators working with emerging technologies and mediums to navigate new AI production pipelines.
Fellow with Sierra Foothill Nature Conservancy
Amble Fellowship
Participated in a fellowship to map diverse stakeholder needs and ecological futures in California’s Sierra Foothills. Translated insights into organizational strategy, aligning conservation goals with cultural and community engagement.
Independent Consultant
The Mill
Consulted with The Mill C-Suite on emerging trends in culture, to inform service offerings for the agency.
Lead Worldbuilder, ETC
Fathead
Collaborated with director c. Craig Patterson to flesh out the world behind his script, Fathead. Explored ways to expand the narrative logic of the story universe and translate into designs in concert with the virtual production VAD team.
Lead Worldbuilder, ETC
Ripple Effect
Supported the Ripple Effect directors as they explored utilizing virtual production in their short, and utilizing worldbuilding to extend the narrative world of their scripts. Advised on narrative changes based on constraints of production process--both in terms of virtual production and filming under emerging Covid safety protocols.
Worldbuilder, Head of Product Ecosystem, Xsolla
Babka Worldbuild
Supported the development of foundational worldbuilding and narrative frameworks for the Babka and Nushi narrative world aligned with the Babka product release. Coordinated a multimillion-dollar influencer and ad campaign, launched in in alignment with GDC to position Babka as a culturally resonant product ecosystem in gaming.
Worldbuilder, Head of Product Ecosystem, Xsolla
Babka Product
Led the design of the the product ecosystem for Babka’s gamer wallet, ensuring design consistency across browser extension, in-app, plugin, and in-game environments. Created interaction models and systems that aligned brand story with user experience along with the creative director and lead product designer.
Avatar + AR Co-Leads, Magnopus
Dubai World Expo
As Lead Worldbuilder, developed the narrative, quest, and system design for a mixed-reality experience at the Dubai World Expo. The project blended digital twins with real-world interaction, using avatars and adaptive environments to shape participant journeys
Metaverse/digital twin/mixed reality experience with character, quest, and worldbuilding systems for the Dubai World Expo
Chief Experience Officer and Head of Strategy, Kinestry
Meow Wolf
Designed e-commerce and metaverse strategies to extend Meow Wolf’s immersive narratives into digital and virtual platforms. The project positioned merchandise and digital e-commerce experiences as narrative extensions of the Meow Wolf story universe. Systems design.
Chief Experience Officer and Head of Strategy, Kinestry
Renault Web3 Campaign
Developed a Web3 experience ecosystem that enabled Renault to build ongoing product narratives. The strategy emphasized continuity across physical and digital touchpoints across LBE, mobile, e-commerce, NFT drops, and virtual worlds.
Chief Experience Officer and Head of Strategy, Kinestry
Vans
A project to help a brand build a responsive product creation pipeline informed by machine learning analysis of shoe wear patterns.
Chief Experience Officer and Head of Strategy, Kinestry
Philips
Conducted big data analysis across social media channels to uncover new consumer segments for product innovation. Insights informed marketing strategy and ad targeting.
Chief Experience Officer and Head of Strategy, Kinestry
Jibbitz Social Data
Led social data research to identify new audience behaviors and product opportunities. Findings supported the development of Crocs’ accessory product line (Jibbitz)
Chief Experience Officer and Head of Strategy, Kinestry
Nike Swim
Designed an underlying worldbuild .
Nike's first virtual shoot during Covid.
Lead Narrative Designer, Collective Future
Mars Dinner
Designed a speculative dinner performance imagining life on Mars. The experience blended immersive theater with narrative worldbuilding to spark dialogue on futures of space settlement
Lead Narrative Designer, Collective Future
Art Center College of Design
Partnered with Art Center to develop new curricula and product offerings responsive to cultural and technological shifts. The project introduced design futures thinking into education.
Lead Narrative Designer, Collective Future
VF
Helped VF Corporation explore future product offerings across their portfolio by mapping emergent trends. Insights guided long-term innovation strategies for lifestyle brands in their portfolio, like Timberland, Vans, Dickies, North Face, and more.
Design Lead + Creative Director, Experimental Design
Krysalis
A strategy and design project for an immersive hardware platform that supports therapeutic wellness experiences, drawing inspiration from psychedelic research and altered states. The platform was designed to facilitate responsive, multisensory environments that guide users through moments of transformation, healing, and expanded perception by blending immersive media, biometrics, and narrative design.
Design Lead + Creative Director, Experimental Design
Melco
Created a sustainable experiential program for a micro-city project in Japan. The design emphasized ecological balance and long-term engagement through persistent and continuous ambient storytelling.
Design Lead + Creative Director, Experimental Design
Ford's City of Tomorrow
Led foresight and systems design for Ford’s “City of Tomorrow,” envisioning future urban mobility. The project combined speculative design with internal stakeholder
Design Lead + Creative Director, Experimental Design
Choctaw Community Wellness Center
A project to help a brand build a responsive product creation pipeline informed by data on community interests
Narrative Designer + Worldbuilder, Applied VR
Freebase
Narrative and interactive VR experiencse based on DBT therapeutic frameworks for adolescents with addiction problems entering in-patient therapy
Lead Narrative Designer, Secretmap
Aquarius + Gravity
Live events merging multi-sensory physical installations with participant AR interaction, set in multi-tiered narrative worlds
Lead Narrative/Interaction Designer, Praxis Labs
Training
Led narrative and interaction design for interactive VR training simulations focused on workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion. Developed story-driven modules that immerse participants in lived experiences, enhancing empathy and understanding through roleplay.
Annenberg Innovation Lab for Disney
Fan Engagement Study
IBM Watson-enabled quantitative data analysis and focused fan interviews/tiered survey for a Hollywood brand on the key fan engagement mindsets, targeted to differentially parse patterns of fan engagement. Studied mindset differentiation in terms of platform engagement, purchasing differences, and gender. Presented actionable product and business recommendations to increase franchise engagement and monetization.
Researcher + Lead Writer, Annenberg Innovation Lab
Edison Report
Produced research mapping the rise of new creative and maker communities. Work identified how emerging creators drive cultural and media innovation, while providing guiding principles for digital creators navigating the emerging creator economy.
Annenberg Innovation Lab
Bodhi Tree - Into the Meridian
A project to help a brand build a responsive product creation pipeline informed by data on community interests
Lead Researcher, Annenberg Innovation Lab
HBO Gen Z Showcase
Explored how HBO could leverage transmedia storytelling to deepen audience involvement. The project provided frameworks for millennial and Gen Z engagement
Script Editor, MxR Lab
Madame Maraschino's Mansion of Mystery + Mayhem
Designed new VR scripting methods for horror experiences with MxR Studio. The project pushed the boundaries of interactive narrative
Havas 18 Hubs
Engaging Cities Research
Analyzed how urban environments serve as platforms for consumer engagement. Research projected near-future “smart city” trends across automotive, entertainment, retail, banking, and travel industries. Explored the integration of evolving technologies and entertainment with the city of the near future, in order to project the cultural and industry landscape in physical city spaces 18 months in the future.
Worldbuilding Media Lab
Project Tesseract
Designed process for transmedia narrative productions that incorporates world building at its core while analyzing the inefficiencies and bottlenecks across production workflows in a variety of mediums. Collaborated with production design and VFX team to develop look and layout of worlds to be modeled in Unreal Engine, and guided directors in aligning narrative and world design.