About Us

Mariam Asad is a first-year Digital Media M.S. student who graduated from York University in Toronto, Canada with a B.A. in English Literature and Communications. She is interested in video games as critical texts, both to be read and as ways through which we can read ourselves. Her other interests include rollercoasters, parentheses and various kinds of meat.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues. He is a popular writer and speaker and widely considered an influential thinker and doer in the videogame industry and research community. Ian holds a Bachelors degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and two children.

Simon Ferrari is a second-year Digital Media M.S. student. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Film Studies from the University of Georgia. Simon is particularly interested in ethical choices and hidden biases in video games. He is a rabid Xbox 360 fanboy and indie games snob. His XBL gamertag is SimonLibertador, and you can read his schoolwork blog at http://chungking.wordpress.com/.

Tom Gibes is a first year master's student in the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech. Before coming to tech, he worked at Volition Inc on such titles as Saints Row 2, WWE Legends, and Red Faction Guerrilla.  He received his undergrad in Communications from Northwestern University, where he focused on media studies and screenwriting. In his free time, Tom peruses an ever-increasing list of blogs and views hardcore chart porn in the dark.

Sergio Goldenberg is a professor from the Journalism School of the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, from where he holds a Journalism degree. He is also a Master in Science on Digital Media from Georgia Tech, where he is currently pursuing his Ph.D. His research has been on interactive narrative, computational journalism, and interactive television. In Chile, he taught new media and interactive narrative graduate and undergraduate courses. Parallel to his academic duties, he led for five years the website development area at Channel 13, one of the most important national television networks in Chile.

Cinqué Hicks is a writer, artist, and cultural critic currently pursuing a masters degree in Digital Media at Georgia Tech. His areas of interest include arts ecologies and ubiquitous computing for creative uses in urban environments. He received a bachelor degree in comparative literature at Harvard University. He currently works as the visual arts critic for Creative Loafing, Atlanta's alternative weekly newspaper.

Tanyoung Kim is a second-year PhD student in Digital Media at Georgia Tech. She earned her B.S and M.S in Industrial Design from KAIST, Korea. She also worked as a user experience researcher and interaction designer for NHN, which is the biggest online portal and game website in Asia. Her research interest is in information visualization and its persuasive uses. In the Journalism and Games studio, she focuses on news and editorials about food production and consumption.

Bobby Schweizer joined Georgia Tech's Digital Media Ph.D. program after finishing his Digital Media M.S. last spring. He received his Bachelor's in Media Studies and American Studies from the University of Virginia. Bobby is currently helping to establish a research group in the Experimental Games Lab to focus on space and spatial media. His thesis work explored representations of the city in video games, he maintains blogs at GameCulture Journal and Virtual Fools, produces the bi-weekly Low Score podcast, is an active Twitter user, and enjoys craft beers and TV on DVD.

Alumni:

Ayoka Chenzira is a filmmaker and interactive digital media artist. She has written, directed and produced numerous films and digital media projects that span fiction, animation,  documentary,  performance and experimental narratives. Several of her productions have been translated into French and Japanese and are in permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ayo has garnered many awards for her body of work including the Sony Innovator Award for her early work with converging film, video and computer animation, and the Apple Computer Distinguished Educator Award for her work with storytelling and digital technology. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in digital media at Georgia Tech, specializing in multitouch tabletop storytelling.

Nick Diakopoulos is a 6th year Ph.D. student in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He interests lie at the intersection of human computer interaction (HCI), information visualization, and content analysis with themes from media including journalism, collaborative authorship and annotation, and games.

Adam Rice is a recent M.S. graduate of the Digital Media program. His interests include infovis, digital design, journalism, literary concerns, old school gaming, strip malls (seriously) and breakfast tacos. He keeps a home on the internet at radrice.com.

Ray Vichot is a researcher with an M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University. His background interests are in media, anthropology, and global popular culture. He is currently a first-year Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California. His thesis research focuses on online communities and representation both by the media and by the community itself. He is also interested in game studies and the culture around gaming. In other blogger-ly pursuits, he reviews games and talks about game design for Examiner.com.

Douglas Wilson is a researcher and game designer with an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Doug is currently pursuing a Digital Media Ph.D. at ITU Copenhagen. As a 2007-08 Fulbright fellow in Denmark, Doug developed a number of experimental multiplayer games at IT University of Copenhagen. His primary research interests are political gameplay and the relationship between memory and virtual space. In a previous life, he wrote news coverage for Gamespot.com.