The Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) announced its 2026 HEVGA Fellows at the Games for Change Festival. Four new members were inducted.
Established in 2017, HEVGA’s Fellows Program recognizes senior scholars in the games domain who have made significant contributions to the field in design, theory, or research. HEVGA Fellows are elected by their peers for outstanding contributions to games-based research and design in higher education. Fellows serve as integral ambassadors for the organization and are inducted as lifetime members.
Because fellowship is achieved by election, there is no fellowship application process and nominations may only be submitted and confirmed by current Fellows. Consideration of a candidate begins with their nomination, followed by an extensive and careful vetting process that results in a final ballot of current Fellows.
In 2026, HEVGA’s Fellows inducted four new members:
Kelly Boudreau
Associate Professor – Harrisburg University
Dr. Kelly Boudreau is an academic leader, game studies scholar, and curriculum innovator with more than 20 years of experience advancing game research, education, and industry collaboration. As a Department Chair and Associate Professor, she has led the development of undergraduate and graduate programs in game design, digital media, and interactive technologies, creating curricula that integrate emerging technologies, interdisciplinary learning, and experiential education.
Her scholarship explores game design, player experience, digital culture, and creative practice. She has contributed to the field through research, editorial leadership, peer review, and international collaborations that bridge academic inquiry with professional practice.
Through her leadership, scholarship, and service, she continues to strengthen games education as a discipline while preparing the next generation of game creators, researchers, educators, and academic leaders.
Lissa Holloway-Attaway
Associate Professor – University of Skövde
Lissa Holloway-Attaway is an Associate Professor in Media Arts, Aesthetics, and Narration in the Division of Game Development within the School of Informatics at the University of Skövde (Sweden). She is the leader for the GAME (“games, art, media, experience”) Research Group, and she teaches in the games and Informatics education, from undergraduate to PhD levels. Her background is in theatre performance, literature, and digital culture/media studies, and she works across many digital media forms, from digital art, to electronic literature, and games, with a focus on socio-cultural systems, inclusive design, and user engagement. Her creative and critical work has been published, exhibited and performed in a number of International venues. Her current research is focused on emergent media experiences (AR/VR/MR), interactive digital narrative, sound-based digital interactive experiences/games, digital cultural heritage games, and environmental feminist posthumanities. She is also the Co-Editor in chief for the journal gamevironments and Editor for the Routledge Book Series “Critical Studies in Video Games and Culture,” where she supports publications in innovative game research.
Bart Simon
Professor – Concordia University
Bart Simon is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, and the founding Director of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology at Concordia University. He was also the founding director of the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre from 2010-2016. His areas of expertise cross game studies, science and technology studies, and cultural sociology. His research focuses on the material and cultural dimensions of technologically mediated play and games, and he has worked topics ranging from the sociality of MMOGS to embodied play to AI and playful machine agencies, immersive theatre and games, modding cultures and ecogames.
Nick Taylor
Associate Professor – York University
Nick Taylor is an Associate Professor in York University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies. His work considers the cultural politics and practices of communities who make their living off leisure media, and incorporates ethnographic techniques with more experimental digital methods, as illustrated in the monograph The Grounds of Gaming (2024). This book situates digital play’s longstanding racial and gendered inequities in the material conditions that make gaming possible. His recent projects use LEGO to explore the broader question of how we can build ‘good’ (reciprocal, just) relations with ‘bad’ (environmentally harmful, exploitative) media.