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Hugh McGrory

Co-Founder, Sonify

Hugh McGrory

 Hugh McGrory innovates at the intersection of emerging media and technology.

Hugh McGrory innovates at the intersection of emerging media and technology. As co-founder at Sonify his recent projects include Data-Driven Storytelling: Making Civic Data Accessible with Audio, a year-long initiative based in Wichita Kansas that empowered newsrooms to create data-driven sonification podcast stories working with advisors from the blind and visually impaired community. Hugh leads creative development for TwoTone, the free web-based open source tool for data sonification that allows users to sonify a dataset without writing a single line of code, built with support from Google News Initiative.

Hugh’s professional experience spans the worlds of media, art and technology:

Media

Hugh ran Make, a film and animation studio in collaboration with computer artist Glenn Marshall in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he directed and produced award-winning experimental short films. He taught Film Acting at The Gaiety School / National Theater School of Ireland working with emerging acting and directing talents like Colin Farrell and Caitriona McLaughlin. He was a Teaching Fellow in the Film Studies Dept of Queen’s University Belfast and a Production Executive for short film programs at Northern Ireland Screen before completing a residency in 2007 at Yale University with the scientists in the School Of Medicine’s cellular microscopy lab. Moving to NYC in 2008, he was a Partner at Culture Shock consulting for clients including Vimeo and The National Film Board of Canada to present interactive and virtual reality projects at the Tribeca and Sundance film festivals.

Art

Hugh curated audiovisual interactive installations during Art Basel and Volta Art Fair in New York, Miami and Switzerland. Highlights include screening work by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) in 2011 – 10 years before he sold an NFT at Christie’s for $69 million. In 2011, Hugh also brought the partners together for The Andy Warhol Film Digitization Project, featuring over 500 films by Warhol, developed in collaboration with The Moving Picture Company and Technicolor and described in the NY Times as “the largest effort to digitize the work of a single artist in MoMA’s collection.”

Technology

Hugh has led teams from ideation to execution on four web-based software applications; Morph (for data art), TwoTone (data sonification), Geometric (virtual reality) and Airfield (spatial audio). Hugh was a Finalist for the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism in 2019 and Winner of the Online News Association’s Journalism360 Award in 2018.