Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Natali Tereza Chavez is a PhD candidate in Film at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a Fulbright Visiting Researcher alumna at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Her interdisciplinary work bridges acting, artificial intelligence, and immersive media, exploring how performance can be translated, modeled, and reimagined within computational environments.

Her research focuses on the development of “Virtual Actors,” combining methodologies from affective computing, cognitive science, and film practice. She has conducted experimental studies using EEG and multimodal data from live actors to investigate emotional expression and its applications in AI-driven performance systems. Alongside this, she develops innovative virtual production techniques that integrate computer vision and physically based rendering into filmmaking workflows.

Her paper, Relighting Video Using Camera-Aligned Material Planes, proposes a novel approach to video relighting by reconstructing scene elements as camera-aligned planes enhanced with AI-derived depth, normals, and segmentation. The method enables flexible, physically grounded lighting manipulation of recorded performances, contributing to new creative possibilities in post-production and virtual cinematography.

Natali Tereza Chavez’s work has been presented at leading venues including ACM Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), ACM SIGGRAPH Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG), and DCAC. As both a researcher and professional actress, she brings a unique perspective to the intersection of human performance and machine intelligence, advocating for AI as a collaborative tool that expands, rather than replaces, artistic expression.