Lindsay Grace

Lindsay is Knight Chair of 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 2019 book, Doing Things with Games, Social Impact through Design, is a well-received guide to game design.

He authored or co-authored more than 50 papers, articles, book chapters and books 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 several Blank Arcade exhibits, Smithsonian American Art Museum’s SAAM Arcade (2014-2017), the Games for Change Civic and Social Impact program 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. He has been on the program committee for a variety of conferences include the Foundations for Digital Games Conference, International Conference of Games Jams and Hackathons, Advances in Computer Entertainment, and others. He has given more than 100 academic presentations.

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 has done consulting and game design work for the World Bank, Educational testing Services (ETS), National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) and others.

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.

His teaching career includes teaching more than 75 courses at 5 colleges and universities. Prior to becoming a professor, Lindsay was a software developer and designer, a buyer and a data warehousing integrity analyst at an investment firm.

Clay Ewing

Clay Ewing is a versatile creative professional with a dynamic background spanning game design, education, and innovative technology. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Design & Technology from Parsons The New School for Design and a Bachelor of Arts in Telecommunications Production from Pepperdine University. An award winning game designer and developer, Professor Ewing’s games have tackled issues such as vector borne diseases, the cost of health care, social safety nets and labor practices. His work has been exhibited around the world in festivals and conferences, including ISEA, IndieCade, Games for Change, the Serious Games Showcase and Challenge and Meaningful Play. Clay has worked with numerous non-profits including Red Cross Red Crescent, Open Society Foundations, ROC United, Oxfam, and the AIDS & Rights Alliance for Southern Africa. His projects have been covered by The Huffington Post, NPR, Forbes, and The Consumerist. He is currently the director of NERDLab, an academic game studio at the University of Miami with a focus on mentoring students in design and development.

Kim Grinfeder

Kim Grinfeder is an accomplished artist, designer, and creator who uses emergent technologies to address social and environmental issues. As the founding Chair and Professor at the Department of Interactive Media at the University of Miami, he has made significant contributions to the field of interactive narratives and immersive media. He leads the Institute of Data Science and Computing’s creative computing efforts and runs UMVerse, where he is developing a coordinated strategy to expand leadership in spatial computing. Since its implementation, UMVerse has sparked over 50 research projects across disciplines, transforming the use of immersive media across campus in the field and classroom.

Kim’s research focuses on creating narratives with social impact using immersive media tools and exploring the limits of these technologies. His highly interdisciplinary work has resulted in numerous collaborations across diverse fields, such as medicine, architecture, cinema, journalism, and more. His creative work has been recognized globally, including at festivals and competitions such as the Webby’s, the Atlanta Film Festival, and the National Press Photographers Association. His work has also been exhibited at prestigious venues such as the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Devin Monnens

Devin Monnens is a game historian and practising game artist teaching game design and game studies. He has a background in English literature and medieval studies from the University of Colorado at Denver, and an MFA in Electronic Media Arts Design from the University of Denver where he produced antiwar games as an exploration in socially conscious games and critical game studies. One of these games, Giant Tank, is now part of the Values at Play archive, an international collection of socially conscious games. He is also a volunteer for the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Game Preservation Special Interest Group (SIG) where he promotes game preservation. On the side, he directs development of and does Japanese translation work for the Metroid Database, the largest and longest-running fan site for the Metroid series.

Aris Bricker

Aris Bricker (they/them) is a game designer and educator who views everything as a story. After earning their MS in Game Science and Design at Northeastern University, they spent a year teaching game design and psychology in that same program. They previously worked as a user researcher at Harmonix, and recently joined Ubisoft Red Storm as a game designer.

Lorena Lopez

Lorena Lopez Hechavarria is an interaction and immersive experience designer born in Havana, Cuba, and based out of Miami, FL. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art in 2014 and her Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Miami’s Interactive Media program in the School of Communication. Her design focuses on using digital and physical interactions to fully immerse users in experiences to not only entertain, but also educate. Her goal is to use these techniques to enhance and transform the user experience.

Zeven Rodriguez

Zevensuy Rodriguez is a maker/designer/prototyper born in Miami, FL, He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Interactive Media at the University of Miami. He graduated and was a Fellow at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Masters Program and did his undergrad at Univ. of Miami’s Visual Communications program. He founded Howlin' Wolves a prototyping and fabrication company based in Brooklyn. Projects range from web, electronics, to custom fabrication including CNC Milling. His research focuses on user’s interaction with internet objects by creating interesting interfaces. He also explores combining traditional fabrication techniques with digital ones.

Ching Hua Chuan

Ching-Hua Chuan is a research associate professor of interactive media at University of Miami. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA, USA) Viterbi School of Engineering, and her B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University. Dr. Chuan’s research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, music information retrieval and audio signal processing. She has published refereed articles in journals and conferences on audio content analysis, style-specific music generation, machine learning applications, and music and multimedia information retrieval. She was the recipient of the best new investigator paper award at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in 2010. Dr. Chuan has served on the program committees of International Society of Music Information Retrieval, International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music, International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval, and the scientific advisory committee for Music Similarity workshop at Lorentz center. She is also the co-organizer of the International Workshop on Deep Learning for Music and the founder of Women in Music Information Retrieval (WiMIR).

Randall Barlow

Professor Barlow also has 35 years of experience as a professional musician, performer, songwriter, and producer. He toured with Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine as the lead trumpet player from 1985 to 2010. During this time he developed his songwriting and production skills and wrote and produced many Grammy-nominated and Grammy-winning hits with many artists including Gloria Estefan, Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, Mandy Moore, Alejandro Fernandez, Cristian Castro, Julio Iglesias, Shakira, and many others. Professor Barlow earned a Bachelor’s degree from the Frost School of Music in Studio Music and Jazz trumpet performance, and also achieved his Master’s Degree in Media Writing and Production from the Frost School of Music.

Ubbo Visser

Ubbo Visser, Ph.D., is a prominent faculty member at the University of Miami's Computer Science Department, specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. With a primary focus on real-time knowledge representation and reasoning, Visser aims to blend the realms of Semantic Web and Multi-Agent Systems, harnessing technology developed in one area for the benefit of the other. Funding from prestigious sources, including the European Commission, NIH, and industry leaders like Microsoft, has fueled his groundbreaking research.

As an esteemed scholar, Ubbo serves on the editorial boards of international journals, has authored over 150 research articles, and frequently delivers keynote speeches at global conferences. His expertise is sought after by entities such as NASA, the European Commission, and other renowned research institutions. Beyond academia, Professor Visser has a successful track record of commercial ventures, notably leading the development of a Soccer Manager Game that merges real-world soccer data with advanced AI and 3D rendering technologies, bridging the gap between research and commercial success.