CV

Work experience

Senior Manager, Application Development at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
2021 – present
Led the team that moved metmuseum.org off an internally hosted CMS and onto a cloud stack of Next.js, Sanity, Vercel, and Elasticsearch. We made domain modeling, code review, automated testing, and DevOps part of our day to day.
Lead Developer, Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
2016 – 2021
Led the team that built the ETL pipelines and APIs behind The Met’s Collection and The Met’s Open Access Initiative, which has served over 900 million API requests as of mid-2026. We made collection object pages faster worldwide and moved the stack onto IIIF and Golang.
Manager of Media Technology, Digital at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
2014 – 2016
Ran the team behind the Met’s mobile work: the Met App, the Audio Guide, and in-gallery kiosks. The content in those apps was maintained by hand, as documents in a licensed system. We replaced that with an automated pipeline in Python and Postgres and saved the Museum tens of thousands per year. The features we wanted next needed more data, scattered across databases, microsites, and file shares the web couldn’t reach. Nothing was connected. So we sunset all of it, the apps, the kiosks, the audio guide, and built the layer underneath instead.
Media Technology Developer at Museum of Modern Art
2007 – 2014
Built MoMA’s first mobile app, native and mobile web, along with the API behind it, and took it from prototype to production. I started as the only developer, then worked with a contractor, and later as part of a larger team pairing at Pivotal Labs. Replatformed moma.org from PHP and MSSQL to Ruby on Rails and Postgres, and moved it onto our own unix servers on commodity hardware. A large part of the job was in-gallery work built for particular exhibitions.
Technologist at WNYC
2006 – 2007
Special Projects Technologist at AV&C
2006 – 2007
Business Analyst, Licensing at ASCAP
2001 – 2005
Supported account managers collecting license fees from radio broadcasts, and built the reporting application they used.
Team Lead, International Distribution at ASCAP
1996 – 2001
Led the International Monitoring Unit, a team of translators who reconciled international revenue distributions against TV guides.
Webmaster at Anthology Film Archives
1998 – 2000
Co-founder at Fluid Ounce Records
1996 – 1999
Music Buyer at Mondo Kim’s
1996

Publications

Connecting to art: How The Metropolitan Museum of Art used a public API to share 5,000 years of human creativity with audiences beyond its walls.

Choi, Jennie and Spencer Kiser. "Connecting to Art: How The Metropolitan Museum of Art Used a Public API to Share 5,000 Years of Human Creativity with Audiences Beyond its Walls." Increment. Issue 14. August 2020.

Celebrating Three Years of Open Access at The Met

Andersen, Sofie and Spencer Kiser. "Celebrating Three Years of Open Access at The Met." Perspectives, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. February 19, 2020.

Mapping User Feedback on the Met App

Filardi, Liz and Spencer Kiser. "Mapping User Feedback on the Met App." Digital Underground, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. July 22, 2015.

Exploring sound and space with the MoMA Studio: Common Senses Sound Map

Kiser, Spencer. "Exploring sound and space with the MoMA Studio: Common Senses Sound Map." Inside/Out: A MoMA/P.S.1 Blog, The Museum of Modern Art. January 14, 2013.

Sonictroller

Hindman, David and Spencer Kiser. "Sonictroller." Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME05). Vancouver, BC, Canada. pp. 254–255.

Talks

AI comes to the museum

August 18, 2026

Panel at Aboard, New York, NY

Delving into Open Access Artwork Metadata and Imagery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

June 18, 2023

Invited Talk at Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Workshop 10, organized in conjunction with 2023 Conference of Computer Vision Pattern Recognition, Vancouver, BC, CA

Artwork Collection Data at The Met

June 17, 2019

Invited Talk at Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Workshop 6, organized in conjunction with 2019 Conference of Computer Vision Pattern Recognition, Long Beach, CA, USA

App Crit

April 21, 2017

Panel at MW17: Museums and the Web 2017, Cleveland, OH, USA

Building a Map for the Met App

November 06, 2015

Case Study at Museum Computer Network Annual Conference 2015, Minneapolis, MN, USA

MoMA Studio Sound Map

November 22, 2013

Case Study at Museum Computer Network Annual Conference 2013, Montreal, QC, Canada

MoMA App 2.0

November 22, 2013

Case Study at Museum Computer Network Annual Conference 2013, Montreal, QC, Canada

spinCycle

June 05, 2006

Poster Demo at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) 2006, Paris, France

Auditory Interfaces for Small Screen Data Representation

March 07, 2006

Session at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2006, San Diego, CA, USA

(Geo) Phone Tag

January 25, 2006

Demo at ETel Fair, O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference 2006, San Francisco, CA, USA

Teaching

Communications Lab

Masters course, Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, New York, NY

Soundwalk Studio: Making Environmental Sound Art

Workshop, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Education

Master of Professional Studies (M.P.S.), Interactive Telecommunications Program
New York University
2004 – 2006
Audio Engineering Certificate
The New School
2000
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), German Language and Literature
Boston University
1992 – 1994
Germanistik Austauschprogramm
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
1993 - 1994

Volunteering

Research Coach at Forest Hills Junior FIRST LEGO League
2015 – 2016
Coached a team of eight seven- and eight-year-olds in mechanics, sensors and motors, and recycling and reuse. The team built a Materials Recovery Facility using the LEGO WeDo robotics kit.

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