Since arriving at Virginia Tech in 2016, Weaver has taught across a number of subjects, as well as providing undergraduate and graduate mentorship in topics such as:

• Video Production

• Video Compositing (After Effects)

• Documentary Media

• Narrative Media

• Scientific + Medical Communication

• Sound

• Art + Ecology

• Environmental Design

• Projection Mapping

• Installation Art

• Performance Art

• Foundations of Digital Media + Creative Technologies

• New Media Art Theory

• Histories + Theories of Computing

• Native + Indigenous Studies

Leading programs in Iceland, Weaver has taught the following subject areas:

• Bio-Art

• Augmented Reality

• Virtual Reality

• Stop-Motion Animation

• Sound Art

• Documentary Video

• 16mm Video

• Arctic Ecology

During graduate school at Indiana University, Weaver taught foundations of digital arts courses to undergraduate students. Later, as a visiting faculty at the IU School of Fine Arts and IU Media School, Weaver taught courses in the following subject areas to both graduate and undergraduate students:

• Video Art

• Animation

• Game Design

• 3D Modeling

• 3D Animation

• Soft Modeling

• Sound for Video Games

Weaver has led various workshops for both highly-specific audiences and within fully public-facing contexts since 2011. The subject areas of workshops have varied wildly depending on the needs of specific communities. Below are a few quick examples:

• The art of Foley sound production (introduction to processes and Foley recording)

• No-budget video production education for health organizations to serving rural communities

• Introductory After Effects training for Indigenous community leaders producing strategic media for land rights court cases

• Acoustic ecology and field recording as a strategy to connect more deeply to place

• Introductory foraging for wild foods: safe mushroom hunting, identification of native plants, cooking wild foods

• Advanced 16mm direct animation workshops for filmmakers

• 360 video production and post-production processes

• Collage as an expressive modality to voice loss and grief for displaced/refugee communities

• Management of media archives: digitization and preservation of sound, video, and film

Weaver has worked as a media professional since 2009, serving in roles spanning film industry and creative technologies areas. Weaver’s roles have ranged from writer/director to cinematographer, animator, editor, researcher, and producer. Weaver has worked on short, broadcast, and feature-length independent and commercial films, consulted on story development for AAA video games and virtual reality projects, and have maintained an active experimental media practice of their own. Most recently, Weaver is leading production of a documentary series on vector-borne diseases for the Centers for Disease Control.

As an early adopter of emerging technology, Weaver has contributed to many unique production contexts integrating immersive, interactive, and responsive media. Weaver and artist collaborator Matt Starr designed and developed the first large-scale (10-story) projection-mapping in Chelsea, NYC for the NY Fashion Week opening of Kenneth Willardt’s exhibition “Size Does Matter” in 2013. Weaver has since consulted widely on projects incorporating installation, projection, and immersion.

Weaver has extensive experience teaching within the moving image and multimedia production fields, offering specialized guidance to learners at all stages: from stop-motion animation workshops for youth, to game design crash courses, to documentary media production strategies for nonprofit organizations, to professional masterclasses in projection mapping and virtual reality.

Weaver has worked extensively within fine art educational contexts, from work with youth, to ongoing roles as a professor contributing to undergraduate and graduate fine art and design education. Weaver regularly gives artist talks, provides studio visits, mentors students, hosts student groups, reviews programs, leads various workshops, and serves on MFA and PhD committees centering creative practice.

Weaver is a sound artist, musician, professional Foley artist, and composer. Sound is key to Weaver’s art and filmmaking practice, often setting the stage for the entire video post-production process. Weaver’s creative process nearly always incorporates field recording, music performance and composition, and immersive considerations of the power and impact of sound. Weaver has led workshops on topics ranging from site-specific sound, to the building of speakers and microphones. Additionally, as a musician, Weaver performs and records in several bands, including in a new performance project, Fifolet, which is music, acoustic ecology, and video microscopy collaboration with artist Caleb Flood.

Weaver’s first efforts in documentary media were in service to HIV/AIDS hospice care and the communication of important medical information to communities in Tanzania. This set the stage for a lifelong commitment to and belief in the power of documentary and story to influence community wellbeing and have real, tangible impact on lives. Weaver has since worked on numerous documentary, environmental design, and science communication projects, and regularly collaborates on grants, with doctors, and with scientists to produce content that positively impacts public awareness.

Weaver has curated exhibitions since 2011, with a special focus on emerging technology and time-based media. They have served as a juror, screener, and curator for film festival contexts, as well as curating exhibitions that showcase video, multimedia, XR, and installation works. Weaver has had the honor of overseeing numerous exhibitions supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New Orleans. They have also worked as a consultant aiding other professional curators, museums, galleries, and film festivals on the integration and management of new media and digital technologies into public exhibition and collection alike.

Weaver’s research closely engages themes of place, site, and geography, from oral history around land use, to wayfinding and pilotage, to memory and exploration charged/loaded landscapes. Below are a handful of examples of themes:

• unseen histories and invisible narratives of place

• contested geographies (borders, sites in flux)

• cultural memory of landscapes

• onomastics

• land navigation, wayfinding, celestial navigation, pilotage, dead reckoning

• sites in memoriam

• contested management and use of land

• displacement, migration

• connection to place and local ecologies

• place and personal or community memory

Storytelling is a word that is overused and under-examined, often lauded, and rarely considered with depth. As an artist and media-maker, Weaver’s creative work integrates story in nearly every capacity. Weaver undertakes research on narrative, its power, expansive reach, and impact. As a writer, Weaver’s approach leans into nonfiction and magical realism; they have always had an imagination for the real and are particularly interested on under-explored subject-areas and overlooked stories. Weaver’s narrative research can be divided into two categories, broadly defined:

1. Documentary, nonfiction communication of medicine, health information, science, and environment.

2. Poetic, magical realism, and exploratory experimental narrative forms around nature, the nonhuman, personal memory, identity, loss, and place.

Overall, Weaver’s work in narrative prioritizes expanded definitions of nonfiction.

Weaver has contributed to numerous community-led cultural preservation efforts within Alaska Native, First Nations, and Indigenous communities in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, East Africa, and Central America. As a facilitator of emerging technology education and as a solely technical collaborator, Weaver supports communities guiding the management of their own cultural productions and serving as the arbiters of their own ethnographic, oral history, and media archives. Learning and working within these contexts remains one of the great honors of Weaver’s career and continues to inspire and motivate their efforts in service to community.

As a researcher within these spaces, Weaver has worked within Arctic and Central American communities facing land loss and landscape transformation due to climate crisis.

Weaver has special interest in the ways relationship to land provides key scaffolds for culture, and their projects have addressed language loss, language preservation, Native land stewardship, and Native foodways.

Weaver’s critical interest in posthumanism, both in artistic practice and within theory and critique, reflects an ongoing focus on questions of relatedness. How do humans situate themselves amongst one another and amongst other beings in an expansive, more-than-human world? In the face of climate crisis, anthropocentric navel-gazing, capitalist exploitation of land, and growing technological atomization of individuals and alienation from community, Weaver considers the posthuman a useful framework with which to consider our place in the world alongside our technological present. They frequently explore these topics within publications, lectures, and seminar and conference roundtables.

Weaver’s upbringing in rural areas of Alaska and West Virginia facilitated foundational knowledge and commitment to working with awareness of landscape, nonhuman life, and ecology. Weaver grew up hunting, fishing, and foraging. An active ethical forager today, and a former chef, Weaver has led and co-facilitated workshops, walks, and lectures on the use of edible wild mushrooms and plants for food, medicine, and culture. Rather than considering the fruits of our natural world as yet another resource to simply be exploited, Weaver’s efforts aim to build connection, awareness, curiosity, and empathy for wild places and nonhuman lives. Examples of subtopics include:

• Dyeing wool with wild plants: from foraging to knitting

• Wild fermentation and food preservation for health and culture

• Changing land: foraging in Appalachia in all seasons

• Foraging edible mushrooms

• Introductory fly fishing

• Tanning and working with leather

• Cooking where you are: goût de terroir, the gifts of the land