Category: Bio

Katherine Isbister is a Human Computer Interaction and Games researcher who studies and designs digital games and other playful computer-supported experiences. Her focus is emotion and social connection–understanding the impact of design choices on these qualities, and getting better at making and evaluating digital experiences that support and enhance social and emotional experience. Her lab group’s work has been cited in Wired, Scientific American, and NPR, among other venues.

Isbister is currently a full professor in the Department of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is a core faculty member in the Center for Games and Playable Media. Until June 2015, she was an associate professor jointly appointed between the Computer Science department at New York University’s School of Engineering in Brooklyn, and the NYU Game Center, and was the founding Research Director of the Game Innovation Lab at NYU’s School of Engineering.
After completing a Ph.D. at Stanford University, where she studied Communication as well as Human-Computer Interaction, Isbister worked in research labs in Japan, Sweden, Denmark, and the U.S., and in software start-ups and design consultancies (past clients include Microsoft, Paramount, BMW, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and others), in addition to being a research professor. Along the way, she has written several books: Better Game Characters by Design,Game Usability, and most recently, How Games Move Us. Better Game Characters was nominated for a Game Developer Magazine Frontline Award. In 1999, she was selected as one of MIT Technology Review’s TR100 Young Innovators most likely to shape the future of technology.

Lindsay is Knight Chair in Interactive Media and an associate professor at the University of Miami School of Communication. He is Vice President for the Higher Education Video Game Alliance and the 2019 recipient of the Games for Change Vanguard award. Lindsay’s book, Doing Things with Games, Social Impact through Design, is a well-received guide to game design. In 2020, he edited and authored Love and Electronic Affection: a Design Primer on designing love and affection in games

His work has received awards and recognition from the Games for Change Festival, the Digital Diversity Network, the Association of Computing Machinery’s digital arts community , Black Enterprise and others. He authored or co-authored more than 50 papers, articles and book chapters on games since 2009. His creative work has been selected for showcase internationally including New York, Paris, Sao Paolo, Singapore, Chicago, Vancouver, Istanbul, and others. Lindsay curated or co-curated Blank Arcade, Smithsonian American Art Museum’s SAAM Arcade, the Games for Change Civic and Social Impact and others.

He has given talks at the Game Developers Conference, SXSW, Games for Change Festival, the Online News Association, the Society for News Design, and many other industry events.

Between 2013 and 2018 he was the founding director of the American University Game Lab and Studio. He served as Vice President and on the board of directors for the Global Game Jam™ non-profit between 2014-2019. From 2009 to 2013 he was the Armstrong Professor at Miami University’s School of Art. Lindsay also served on the board for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) between 2013-2015.

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.