Galt Guli MacDermot
I’m a multidisciplinary creative, technologist, and former product manager based in Brooklyn. I’ve sold solar power in rural Tanzania, helped fight child exploitation at Pinterest, raised venture capital funding with a company I co-founded, and conducted econometric research on Indonesian economic policy for the World Bank. I’m now a graduate student in ITP at NYU Tisch. I was born and raised in New York and studied economics at Harvard.
Web game · 2026
Thereabouts
A real-time multiplayer geography game — guess where in the world a photo was taken, faster than everyone else guessing along with you. Built the whole stack myself: matchmaking, timed rounds, a live leaderboard, a new daily challenge every morning. Launched with a video that pulled in 120,000+ views, and for a while a few thousand people were playing every day. It's not a business — just a thing I wanted to exist, and then a lot of strangers wanted it too. (TypeScript, Node/Express, Socket.IO, SQLite, Leaflet.)
Visit →Systems, journalism · 2025
Borough Brief
Every morning, a program I built reads sixteen local news sources and decides what New Yorkers actually need to know today — a transit fare hike outranks a mayor's gossip, always. That judgment turns into a written brief, a narrated audio summary, and a short video edition, published under the name Five Borough Brief / Top News NYC. No newsroom behind it — just the ranking logic I designed, running on its own. It's pulled in 700,000+ views and 10,000+ followers. (Python, Flask, LLM APIs, Google Cloud Run.)
Visit →Physical computing · 2025
MIDI Drum Kit Gloves
A pair of gloves that turn a fist into a drum kit. Six pressure sensors read how hard each finger hits, and the harder you hit, the harder the drum sounds — real velocity, not just on/off. Built the hardware in Arduino, then built a screen to go with it: a visualizer that turns every note into a burst of color and motion, so you can see the beat as well as hear it. A companion browser-based rhythm game tests the timing and gives the hardware something to play against besides Ableton.
Short film, writer/director
Forward Deployed
A young Palantir engineer learns a colleague has been killed and that he might be next — then races across New York to reach company headquarters, only to discover the safety he's running toward was never really on offer. Palantir didn't put him in danger. It just decided, once the danger arrived, that he was a liability to manage rather than someone to save. A paranoid, plausible thriller in the vein of Three Days of the Condor — the tension is physical for most of it, then goes cold and institutional in the last act, delivered politely over a Zoom call.
Animation
Gundam vs. Bear
A giant Gundam warrior faces off against the single greatest threat New York has to offer: my dog, Bear. Animated frame by frame in After Effects — no plot beyond the stakes being enormous and the opponent being a very good boy.
Performance
Acting & Voice Acting
Started in theatre — high school, then college — before moving in front of a camera: five to seven short films, plus two projects where you'd only recognize me by voice.
Teaching · 2026
Teaching
Graduate assistant for Hypercinema at NYU Tisch — an undergraduate course built around the newest tools and approaches for making moving images.
Fabrication, wood
Yarn Spool Bookends
A pair of bookends, carved and turned from oak, each topped with a wooden spool — so the thing holding your books upright is also quietly holding your yarn.