media artist
With the launch of the multiple award-winning game Darfur is Dying, I co-founded Take Action Games, a studio that created linkages between gameplay and the histories and practices of documentary filmmaking and socio-political advocacy. Take Action Games has garnered several awards, including the Games For Change Audience Award, the Adobe MAX Award for Social Responsibility, Honoree status in the Webby Award’s Activism Category, and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences prestigious Governors Award in collaboration with the MTV Networks' Sudan media campaign (the Emmy’s highest honor). My work has been reviewed in numerous academic venues and covered by press outlets such as National Public Radio, the New York Times, TIME magazine, the Washington Post, Gamasutra, Jezebel, and Mashable.
educator
As a first-generation middle school, high school, and college graduate, I was fortunate to attend and earn my B.F.A. from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, an institution with a radically progressive history founded on the belief that advanced education should be free. It was here that my nascent interest in community building conceptually merged with art practice, media-making, and humanities scholarship, thereby laying a foundation for research into creative embodied approaches to social problems. I hold an M.F.A. from the Interactive Media and Games program at the University of Southern California. I also hold a Ph.D. from USC’s Media Arts + Practice program, which has the mission to empower scholar-practitioners in the interpretation and design of experiences to communicate ethically in a world of ubiquitous media. I am an Assistant Professor of film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I hold research, teaching, and service positions in several programs, including the Film and Digital Media Department, the Digital Arts and New Media Program, the Games and Playable Media Program, and the Social Documentation Program. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in art and media production, history, and theory, as well as participatory workshops for other non-academic audiences.