emma nasseri

Emma Nasseri is an artist and builder living in New York City. By day she is a Program Manager for Ripple's University Blockchain Research Initiative; most evenings she's drawing at the Art Students League of New York.

Her work in blockchain and AI grows out of a conviction in technology that centers human dignity, distributed power, digital ownership, and financial inclusion. Before Ripple, she led the University of Kansas Blockchain Institute and co-founded the Kansas Blockchain Fellowship, an experiential program that helps rural students build the technical skills to build independent projects with blockchain and AI.

As an artist, Emma is drawn to elegant forms and motion of the human figure, expressed in charcoal and graphite. She has studied figure drawing at the Lawrence Arts Center and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She previously worked as a wax chaser at Art Castings of Colorado, where she filmed and produced Castings, a documentary on the ancient craft of lost-wax bronze casting and the artisans who keep it alive.

Her artistic and technical worlds converged during her term as a research fellow with the Spencer Museum of Art's Arts Research Integration program. Through this fellowship and her subsequent work as a research assistant at the Institute for Information Sciences (I2S), she collaborated with artists Stephanie Dinkins and Simon Denny on a decentralized counter-mapping protocol that was recently exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San José.

As a developer and community leader, she has been awarded the Ripple Impact award (2024), Best New Subgraph @ ETHDenver (2024), 1st Prize @ HackKU (2024).

Her art has been recognized with the Blakey Prize in Fine Art (2018), Young Visual Artist of the Year (2019), and the Sara & Mary Edwards Paretsky Award for Creativity (2024).