Interdisciplinary artist and researcher, António Baía Reis works across immersive media, performance, music, and experimental audiovisual forms, exploring how emerging technologies can become poetic and critical tools for narrating science, heritage, and contemporary social experience. While immersive media constitutes the core of his practice, his artistic language is inherently hybrid, shaped by his background in acting and music, and unfolding through moving image, live performance, sound composition, and interactive environments.
His work has been exhibited and presented internationally in leading artistic venues, including Somerset House in London, Venice Immersive at La Biennale di Venezia - Biennale Cinema, and the Cannes XR Immersive Competition at the Festival de Cannes, positioning his practice within global conversations on immersive and experimental arts. Across these contexts, he investigates how presence, embodiment, and sensory design can reconfigure the relationship between audience, narrative, and space.
Rooted in an arts-based PhD in Digital Media and over fifteen years of interdisciplinary creation, Reis approaches VR, AR, MR, 360° film, and AI not as technological spectacle but as dramaturgical and compositional material. His doctoral research, conducted in collaboration with the University of Porto and Stanford University, under the supervision of R. B. Brenner, a former Washington Post editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, focused on the intersection of 360° virtual reality filmmaking, participatory storytelling, and social change. His projects frequently blur the boundaries between documentary and performance, research and artistic experiment, staging encounters that privilege affect, ethical proximity, and shared authorship, often engaging with questions of memory, intangible heritage, and the emotional textures through which identities are formed and transmitted, while remaining attentive to the margins where cultural experience is most fragile, complex, or unseen.
Music and sound, often developed as integral narrative structures rather than background elements, play a central role in shaping immersive atmospheres and emotional architectures, opening space for sensorial forms of remembrance as well as speculative gestures toward possible futures.
Operating between artistic production and academic research, he cultivates a practice where theory and creation continuously inform one another. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor in Audiovisual Communication at the University of Salamanca (Spain), developing arts-based research on immersive media arts and the creation of innovative artifacts that engage science, heritage, and art through new experiential forms. Alongside his research, he serves as Director and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cinema & Territory, member of the editorial board of Media Practice and Education, and member of the advisory board of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, with published work in leading international scientific journals.
His projects operate like thresholds: they invite the audience to step inside contested memories and emerging futures, where technology becomes a medium for empathy, friction, and reimagined belonging.