Samantha Tauber, FRSA
Samantha Tauber, FRSA is Founder, Director, and CEO of VNCCII, Space Diplomacy Envoy at the Garibay Institute, and Venture Partner at VU Venture Partners. An Australian-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist, author, music producer, and creative technologist, she uses music, motion capture, extended reality, and virtual production to examine how technology is reshaping creativity, identity, and human experience.
Since 2018, Samantha has released music and performed as VNCCII, a fictional AI superheroine alter ego she embodies through live motion capture and in costume on stage. Her shows combine LED volume visuals, motion capture built in Unreal Engine, and holographic effects. Her self-written and self-produced 2024 single Hyper Drive was mixed and mastered by Grammy-winning engineer Luca Pretolesi.
Read VNCCII Unveils New Single ‘Hyper Drive’ Alongside Latest Creative Project, VNCCII’s Creator Talks XR, Avatars and AI: ‘Imagination Is One of Our Greatest Gifts as Humans…’, and VNCCII: Cosmic Communities, her December 2024 cover feature in the RSA Journal, where she describes how the character was inspired by our Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about AI.
VNCCII anchors Galacta.i.ssance, a space opera franchise spanning literature, recorded music, live performance, and games. Its first novel, VNCCII: The Awakening of a Divine Warrior, appeared in February 2026 with a foreword by our Frank White, author of The Overview Effect. Its text has been laser-etched onto a gold-plated NanoFiche archive bound for the lunar south pole aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One as part of the Galactic Library Preserve Humanity collection. Read New Book to Be Preserved for 1 Million Years on the Moon.
In June 2026, she told the story of the book at the British Interplanetary Society, which she joined that spring. Watch Samantha Tauber’s Lecture ‘From Imagination to Infinity’ at the British Interplanetary Society.
Samantha was appointed Space Diplomacy Envoy at the Garibay Institute, founded by Fernando Garibay to advance soft power and public diplomacy, in July 2025. That month she sang her original composition Save Our Humanity at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for the 75th anniversary Legacy of Launch campaign of the U.S. Space Force Historical Foundation
She has been Artist in Residence at the Interstellar Foundation, a nonprofit that sends human-made messages into space, since 2024. In November 2025, she led its collaboration with the RSA, Celestial Bottle: A Message Across Space and Time, to co-create a message for the foundation’s Aspire 2 Moon Mission.
Samantha joined the advisory board of GEN Space, the space entrepreneurship program of the Global Entrepreneurship Network, in 2025, and has advised Earth 300, the planned nuclear-powered research vessel for sustainability science, since 2026. At VU Venture Partners, a multi-stage global venture fund, she has served since March 2026 on the Frontier vertical team covering space technology, deep tech, quantum, longevity, AI, and neuroscience. She earned the Venture Capital Masterclass certificate of Venture University in 2025 and was an International Partner of the WBAF Angel Investment Fund between 2022 and 2024.
A member of Abundance360 since 2024, Samantha joined after reading Abundance by Peter H. Diamandis and our Steven Kotler, and was invited into its Abundance Ascend program for women leaders in technology and longevity. Read Samantha Tauber (VNCCII): Building the Future Before the World Catches Up. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has been UK Country Chair for Humanity, Technology and Innovation at G100 since 2024.
Samantha writes on avatars, AI, and the metaverse. She is the author of Constructing and Evolving with the Virtual Self: Exploration of Digital Twins and Experiential Living in AI & Society (2025) and of Metaverse Music and Multimedia Storytelling, a chapter in the Springer Handbook of the Metaverse (2026). In 2022, she contributed to the Metaverse Delphi Study of the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, and since 2023, she has chaired the Entertainment Working Group of the World Metaverse Council and taught at the Metaverse Hub, the executive program of MIT Enterprise Forum CEE and Molecule Group.
A keynote speaker represented by Chartwell Speakers and The Double Agents, Samantha has spoken at the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, YPO, Abundance360, and the Royal Society of Arts, and performed at Brits Week, the Athens XR Summit, and the Global Entrepreneurship Conference. During the pandemic she hosted the broadcast series Future Humans as VNCCII, with guests including astronaut Chris Boshuizen. She judges the OpenArt Music Video Awards.
In 2023, Samantha received the Music Award at the Metaverse Entertainment World Summit in Monaco for outstanding progress in the music metaverse. Read MEWS 2023: Monte Carlo Hosts World’s Most Exclusive Metaverse Summit and Awards. She was named one of the Top 100 Women of the Future in Web3 and the metaverse in 2022 and one of APAC Entrepreneur’s Most Dynamic Entrepreneurs in the Entertainment Industry that year. She also received the Creative Women Platform Excellence in Innovation Award in 2023, the Oxford Club Innovation in the Metaverse Award in 2024, and the Royal Club Award for Gen Z AI Artistry in 2025.
Samantha earned her Bachelor of Marketing and Media in 2020 from Macquarie University with a 4.0 GPA. She completed the Wharton Executive Education certificates Business in the Metaverse Economy and Economics of Blockchain and Digital Assets in 2022 and the Tracks to Space course of the International Space University in 2025. She trained in music production at Ableton Liveschool in Sydney, and between 2015 and 2017, helped organize the Ableton User Group Sydney, the city’s first Ableton Live user group.
Visit her website, LinkedIn profile, and VNCCII page. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and X.