Irina Nalis (at)

From Discourse to Disco:

Irina Nalis, a psychologist with a PhD, transformation researcher, and techno veteran, is a curator for the discourse program at Elevate Festival.

Beyond this happy role at Elevate, Irina works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Linz Institute for Transformative Change (JKU) and the CDLab for Recommender Systems at TU Wien. As the volunteer chairwoman of GiN (gemeinsam.inklusiv.normal), she advocates for self-determination and inclusion of people with disabilities, bringing perspectives from the social economy into innovation and public welfare debates. Additionally, she serves as a Creative Industries advisor to Austria’s Federal Ministry of Labor and Economy, working at the intersection of culture, economy, and social transformation.

She shares her interdisciplinary approach through lectures and collaborations with organizations striving for regenerative change in work and economic structures. These include public institutions, infrastructure operators, and the architectural firm Mostlikely, where she contributes to sustainable urban development concepts.

It’s the psychology, lovely.

With a human-centered and potential-oriented mindset, she enjoys training the “change muscle” in teams. Irina is an ambassador for the Vienna Manifesto for Digital Humanism and practices the art of ambiguity tolerance every day.