Contributor List, Issue 30
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Contributors / Issue 30 : Poetics of Play

Iasmin Omar Ata is a Middle Eastern & Muslim award-winning comics artist, game designer, and illustrator who creates art about coping with illness, understanding identity, dismantling oppressive structures, and Arab-Islamic futurism. Their recent graphic novel, Mis(h)adra, has resonated with readers and reviewers alike with its vivid and searingly honest account of epileptic lived experience. Iasmin has been reviewed by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, The Electronic Intifada, Library Journal, NPR, and such; they’ve taught & spoken at the New York Public Library and Harvard University. They thrive on dedication, dreams, and hard work — and believe wholeheartedly in the healing power of art.

Grant Bollmer is the author of three books, Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection (2016, Bloomsbury), Theorizing Digital Cultures (2018, SAGE), and Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction (2019, Bloomsbury). He is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at North Carolina State University, where he teaches in the Department of Communication and the Ph.D. program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM), and is an Honorary Associate of the Department of Media and Communications and the Digital Cultures Program at the University of Sydney.

Nilson Carroll is an MFA candidate at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. A barista-poet, Nilson is currently exploring 16mm expanded cinema, video projection performance, and makes queer video game installations. Nilson is a champion of non-commercial and anti-imperialist games and art.

Nicole Kurashige is a Ph.D. student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, English Department. She currently teaches first-year composition and second-year literary studies as part of her GAship duties. Her research interests include life writing studies with an emphasis on trauma narratives and graphic (auto)biographies, New Media studies with an emphasis on webcomics, podcasts, and video games, and Writing Center pedagogy.

Oscar Moralde is a doctoral candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. He studies embodied aesthetics and ideology in video games and other media. His writing can be found in The Journal of Popular CultureWell Played JournalMedia Fields Journal, and the Criterion Collection.

Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough is a researcher and game designer based in Toronto, Canada. They recently graduated from the Comparative Media Studies Master’s program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they worked as a research assistant at the MIT Game Lab. Currently, they are co-authoring a textbook on the theory and critical practice of worldbuilding with Professor Damien Charrieras at the City University of Hong Kong. Their research interests include affect theory and the formal analysis of new media, transnational media production and consumption, and emergent forms of academic creation and expression. This essay is adapted from parts of Kaelan’s Master’s thesis, which examines intimate affects in contemporary AAA video games.

Marc Ouellette is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Old Dominion University. Marc is currently working on a book that studies the ways video games bring out and yet mask the contradictions in masculinities. He is the author (with Jason Thompson) of The Post-9/11 Video Game: A Critical Examination. His primary research and teaching areas are gender, sex and sexuality in contemporary popular culture. He is the Learning Games Initiative Research Fellow and has received multiple awards for his teaching. Since 2007 he has been the Managing Editor of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture and is on the advisory boards of several journals. At Old Dominion he teaches graduate classes in games and pedagogy, cultural theory, and gender, sex and sexuality.

Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in the spaces most hostile toward it. Since 2012, Washko has also been facilitating The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft. She is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and is additionally a core faculty member for the MFA program.


Special Contributor:

Aubrey Anable is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in The School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University, where she is also cross-appointed with the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture. She received a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. Her book Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (University of Minnesota Press, Spring 2018) provides an account of how video games compel us to play and why they constitute a contemporary structure of feeling emerging alongside the last sixty years of computerized living. Anable is an advisory editor for the journal Camera Obscura. She is currently co-editing The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Visual Culture.

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