Andrew Phelps serves as a Professor in the Film & Media Arts division of the School of Communication at American University, and as Director of the AU Game Center, a multidisciplinary effort that engages faculty, staff, and students from several divisions and departments across AU. He also holds a joint appointment as a Professor in the Computer Science Department in the AU College of Arts & Sciences. AU offers several degrees and certificates relative to games and media, including an MA in Game Design and an MFA in Games and Interactivity, and Phelps advises students in these programs as well as other areas of media arts and computing.
In addition to these permanent roles, Phelps also holds a visiting lectureship at Uppsala University in Sweden through the transformative play initiative within the Department of Game Design. This work is centered largely on collaborations involving his interests in existential, transformative play, and theorizing a design framework for games of this type through collaborations with Dr. Doris Rusch and other faculty at the Gotland campus.
Prior to July of 2019, Phelps served as a Professor of Art & Design in the College of Art & Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and before that as a Professor in the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing & Information Sciences at RIT, for nearly 20 years. He is the founder of the RIT School of Interactive Games & Media, the founder of the RIT Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity (MAGIC) and the founder of MAGIC Spell Studios at RIT, the last of which is a $25M public-private partnership between RIT and the State of New York to help expand the games, film, and media industries in New York.
His work in games programming education has been featured in The New York Times, CNN.com, USA Today, National Public Radio, IEEE Computer, and several other articles and periodicals. He regularly publishes work exploring collaborative game engines and game engine technology and maintains a website featuring his work as an educator, artist, programmer, and game addict. Primary research and teaching interests include online gaming, electronic entertainment, 3 dimensional graphics and real time rendering, virtual reality, and interactive worlds.