Cristóbal Valenzuela


Speech given as an honoree at the 2026 NYU Tisch Gala in NYC.

April 2026

Thank you, I’m honored to be receiving this recognition.

Thank you to Rubén Polendo, Dan Shiffman, Shawn, Dano, Gabe, and the entire ITP and NYU family.

You know, when I was asked to write this speech, I made the mistake of looking up who had stood here before me. I wanted context. I think I got something else. A lot of pressure.

The number of Oscars, Tonys, Grammys, and BAFTAs connected to this stage is slightly terrifying. This school has shaped so much talent, so much art, and so much cultural impact. So it really is an honor to be standing here with you.

I should also say, in the interest of transparency, that I do not have an Oscar. Or a Tony. Or a Grammy. Or a BAFTA. I’m sorry to disappoint you all. And so far, I’m pretty far from winning anything close to it.

I co-founded a company. We make tools. We make software. We do art and science. We train AI models.

Which led me to a simple question: why am I here?

I kept trying to find the right answer, and after a while I realized that maybe I was looking for the wrong thing. I was looking for a label that would make my path seem coherent. Artist. Technologist. Founder. Researcher. Student.

Maybe what brought me here is not that I fit one of those labels especially well. I don’t think I do. Maybe it is that I never really fit any of them on their own.

So today I want to talk about labels. About fitting in. And about what happens when you stop treating labels as destiny. And I want to share three lessons.

Twelve years ago, I was in Chile, I studied finance, economics, and business. I graduated at the top of my class, which is usually a strong signal that you should continue doing something sensible. You do the obvious thing one does when you study finance and economics.

You go to do art.

This made very little sense to most people around me. During the day I had a normal job. At night I was in Santiago’s experimental media art scene, making installations and trying to explain them poorly.

At my first gallery exhibition, I built an old typewriter that translated keystrokes into video projections on a wall. Looking back, it was basically a text to video machine before that phrase or that idea meant anything.

While I was setting it up, an artist I admired came over and asked how I was feeling. I told him the truth. I said this world felt new to me. Like strange, being somewhere new. Not quite mine.

He paused, he looked at me and said, “No. You are wrong”

“You are thinking about it the wrong way” He said “There is no other world. There is only this world. You are the one dividing it into two.”

I have never forgotten that.

There was no finance world and art world. No serious world and creative world. No correct path and strange path. There was just the world, and my fear of being seen in the wrong category.

That was my first lesson. Labels can help describe reality. Give a sense of control and structure. They can also keep you at a distance from reality.

Then I came to ITP, and around the same time I discovered deep learning and AI. I became obsessed with the idea that machines could learn, and with the possibility that these systems might change the world, open new forms of creative expression, the way cameras once did, or synthesizers, or editing software, or the internet.

That period did not feel neat or linear. It felt exciting, messy, improbable, and occasionally absurd. Which means it was perfect for ITP.

What would eventually become Runway eight years ago started at 721 Broadway as something much smaller. Calling it a company would have been generous. It was a thesis, or maybe a shared obsession disguised as a project. An obsession around seeing technology as a means to amplify human creativity. If there was a slight chance of using AI to make art and creative expression work, we wanted to be part of it.

Alejandro, Anastasis, and I were all circling the same question from different directions. Alejandro was a designer who also published books and wrote software. Anastasis was a software engineer who wanted to make art. I came to learn about deep learning and I ended up learning deeply about how ITP was a place where everyone who doesn’t fit comes in.

ITP is where you come when you start to care less about being seen in the wrong category.

That was my second lesson. Not fitting in can be a form of direction.

And this recognition, truly, does not belong to me alone. It belongs to Alejandro and Anastasis too. Runway was built by the three of us, as collaborators and close friends, and it began here. By three NYU ITP graduate students. The impact the company has had, the millions of people that rely on our tools on a daily basis to express themselves, to tell stories we might have never heard of before is nothing more than the consequence of our collective hard work. And of our relentless and fearless team that sees technology as a means to amplify human creativity.

Then came the third lesson, which arrived in the form of a question people still ask when they hear our story.

When I tell people the founders of Runway went to NYU, they often assume Tandon, Stern or Courant. When I say we went to art school, there is usually a small pause. Then comes the question underneath the question: how?

How do artists start a company?

How do three immigrants, with no map and no network in Silicon Valley, build a company like this in the first place?

How do people from an experimental art program do research, science, build products, and compete with some of the largest and most well funded companies in the world?

The answer is that the question is wrong.

It assumes artists and engineers live on opposite sides of a border. It assumes art is a decorative layer you add after the real work is done. It assumes technical ambition and creative ambition are different kinds of ambition.

They are not.

Institutions love categories because categories make administration easier.

Great work usually happens when somebody ignores the border map. When somebody decides that design is not separate from engineering, that research is not separate from storytelling, that tools are not separate from culture, that business is not separate from taste or ethics or imagination.

Labels are useful right up until the moment they become walls.

That was my third lesson.

Which brings me to the part of this speech that feels impossible to avoid. AI.

AI is already changing the conditions under which we make literally everything: images, film, music, writing, software, and culture. That produces excitement, anxiety, hope, opportunism, fear. Sometimes all at once.

And I think we should be suspicious of anyone who talks about this moment in only one register. With only one label. If someone speaks about AI with only utopian certainty, they are not paying attention. If they speak about it with only dread, they are also not paying attention. Reality is more inconvenient than that.

This is exactly why artists matter right now.

Luke DuBois once said, in essence, that artists should use the maximum level of technology available to their civilization to make art, while also questioning what that technology means.

Artists do not just use tools. They expose the assumptions inside the tools. They show us what a technology makes easier, what it makes harder, who it includes, who it excludes, and what new language it might make possible.

ITP calls itself the center for the recently possible. I love that phrase. Because the boundary of the possible is moving very fast right now. And that means this is not the wrong moment for artists. It is exactly the moment for artists. Not as spectators. Not as branding consultants for technology. As makers. As critics. As people willing to experiment in public, and also willing to ask what kind of world these tools are helping build.

This school taught me many things, but maybe the biggest was this: learning how to learn is the most important skill. It taught me to build things that matter. To work across forms. To trust curiosity before credentials. And to remember that labels are just words until we decide to obey them.

I should end with a confession. I never actually turned in my thesis. My thesis became Runway. Eight years after graduating, I am apparently still working on it. So maybe this honor is a very elegant reminder from NYU that the assignment is overdue.

Thank you for believing in people who do not fit cleanly into categories. Thank you for building a place where curiosity is allowed to look unreasonable for a while. And thank you for teaching so many of us that there are not two worlds. There is one world, and we still get to decide what to make in it.

Thank you.