Robert Farid Karimi (they/he) is an Assistant Professor of Performance Practices in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. A transdisciplinary Latinx/Mayan/Asian social-practice artist, playfulness polymath, and interactive experience educator/consultant, Karimi creates immersive “game-performances” that spark participants to imagine worlds of mutual community nourishment—where joy is a serious method, and play becomes a civic tool.
Karimi’s research and creative practice focus on audience agency: how rules, prompts, humor, and sensory design can catalyze empathy, civic imagination, and cultural empowerment. He describes his approach as PlayFullSpace—designing experiences that live in real rooms and public spaces, move across bodies and screens, and invite people into participation that feels legible, safe-to-try, and genuinely fun. His process pairs experience architecture (journeys, onboarding, pacing, group dynamics) with rapid prototyping and clear documentation so collaborators can build together across disciplines. A core part of this method is PACE (Playtesting as Community Engagement), a model that treats feedback as a design engine rather than a postscript—inviting communities into the making process as co-testers, co-designers, and co-storytellers.
Karimi’s writing and performance have been featured on NPR and in outlets and anthologies including the Los Angeles Times, Callaloo, Mizna, the Asian American Literary Review, Total Chaos: An Anthology of Hip Hop Theory, and A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. With 25+ years of experience as a cross-disciplinary performer, poet, educator, filmmaker, and social engagement artist, Karimi brings nourishment, playfulness, and interactive storytelling to spaces worldwide—from General Mills to Off-Broadway, from the Nuyorican Poets Café to HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and from the Hawai‘i International Film Festival to The Smithsonian and South by Southwest.
At ASU (2020–2025), Karimi taught and built curriculum in transdisciplinary experience design and games, including immersive public performance, writing for games and generative AI, and virtual performance. He co-founded Public Practice + Generative Play StudioLab, an incubation space for participatory work where students and collaborators prototype interactive projects at human scale, iterate through playtests, and refine concepts into repeatable design patterns. He also developed multi-year undergraduate and graduate curricular pathways (including hybrid/online modules) and produced campus-wide interactive showcases that integrated film, live performance, participatory moments, and spatial UX across multiple venues—work that demanded cross-team alignment, iteration under deadlines, and a “participant-honored” player-centered mindset.
Beyond the university, Karimi is the principal of Kaotic Good Studio and has led creative teams for touring and site-specific interactive works for over two decades. Creative Capital has cited his practice as pioneering in food and social practice. With Iranian-Guatemalan heritage as a point of departure, Karimi’s performance work often inhabits character-driven, comedic, and mythic storytelling. In solo shows, they have embodied figures ranging from the mystical Disco Jesus to pop icon Freddie Mercury to the idealist cook Mero Cocinero—who has cooked for luminaries such as MF DOOM and Yuri Kochiyama, alongside families and change makers in communities across the U.S.
His long-running project Diabetes of Democracy (2009–2023) is a game-like culinary engagement platform that has served more than 80,000 people and reached broader audiences through broadcast and media partnerships. Recent works include American Dream Casino, commissioned by La Jolla Playhouse and presented at the WOW Festival (2025), and American Dream Slot Machine, a Unity-based interactive object developed with support from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering (2025–26). Karimi is LEGO Serious Play–certified and continues exploring emerging AR/VR channels and generative AI tools that bridge digital and non-digital participation.
He is bilingual in Spanish and collaborates widely with artists, educators, technologists, and civic partners to build playful, durable structures for connection—where laughter lowers defenses, rules invite curiosity, and people leave more connected than when they arrived.
Karimi is always working to bring nourishing fun to every environment they enter. RobertFaridKarimi.com