Staff
Celia Pearce – Executive Director
Celia Pearce is an award-winning game designer, artist, curator, author, teacher, and serial instigator. She is an Associate Professor at Northeastern University, and is co-founder and Festival Chair of IndieCade. Her games have been featured at Come Out & Play, Different Games, Incubate, Smithsonian Indie Arcade, and BostonFIG, where here game eBee received the award for most Innovative Tabletop Game. Her publications include Communities of Play (MIT) and Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader (ETC/CMU Press). Her current research and creative practice builds on her pre-academia career as an experience designer for theme parks and is focused on the intersection between game design, live action roleplaying and theatre.
Caroline Murphy – Financial Director
Caroline Murphy– or Caro (CARE-oh) for short– is a game designer, producer, and community organizer that lives and works in the Greater Boston Area. They are co-founder and CEO of BostonFIG, a non-profit organization that dedicates itself to cultivating the next generation of game creators. Caro is Chief Creative Officer of Incantrix Productions, a game company that specializes in interactive theater events. Caro a founding member of the Playable Theatre Company, a nonprofit that supports interdisciplinary creators who are engaged in designing, producing and disseminating interactive live performative works. They teach game design and the business of games at Northeastern University for both the undergraduate and graduate programs. Caro is also Lead Designer at Brain Power, an education-focused company that aims to empower those with invisible neural differences; specifically ADHD and autism. Caro also does freelance narrative design for a number of larping and interactive theater companies across the U.S., including Sinking Ship Creations, Jackalope Live Action Studios, Hanging Lantern Studios, and more. They act in many immersive productions as well, including works by Green Door Labs, Mirror World Creations, Reverie Studios and others. Website.
Daud Alayzer – Operations Director
Bio coming soon!
Board of Directors
Sam Liberty (Board Chair)
Sam is an award winning designer of narrative games, including Forsooth! (Game Chef Winner) and Room at the Top (IndieCade Official Selection). He is also Co-founder of Extra Ludic, a consultancy that develops impactful games for organizations at the highest levels of government and civil society. He studied writing and theater at Emerson College and currently teaches game design at Northeastern University.
Website
Kellian Adams Pletcher
Kellian Adams Pletcher is the founder and mastermind of Green Door Labs, a company that works with informal education organizations to create immersive, interactive, game-based experiences. Her work includes many games with museums and nonprofits including Murder at the Met with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The League of Extraordinary Bloggers with the Association of Children’s Museums and the Mystery of the Megatherium Club with the Smithsonian Archives. Green Door Labs has built hundreds of games with its location-based game engine, the Edventure Builder and most recently Kellian has been busy creating and producing immersive theater productions and collaborations like Save the Munbax and Club Drosselmeyer.
Athena Peters
Athena Z Peters is a designer and producer who started in her passions of games and theater as a child. She has a BFA in Directing Theater and has spent fifteen years working in the video games industry. Most recently she left that industry to open Adventure Pub in Arlington, MA which is both a restaurant, a board game pub and event space from which her other co-owned production company Incantrix Productions which she owns with Caroline Murphy can create works as well as other artists looking for a friendly space to stage their pieces.
Kat Jones
Bio coming soon!
Regine Vital
Bio coming soon!
Nick O’Leary
Bio coming soon!
Students
Adrian Bauer
Adrian Bauer is a current student at Northeastern University studying Theatre and Game Design. He’s off making his own narrative game (if he ever meets his own deadlines), and is thrilled to be in this project. Twitter: @neo_cubist
Aslanta Chen
Aslanta is a video game artist and designer. She is a current game design student at Northeastern University and a former Interface Art Intern at Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Elijah Cobb
Elijah is a game and level designer and amateur playwright studying Games at Northeastern University. He’s seen a whole bunch of Shakespeare and played way too much Smash Bros and now he is here.
Website: http://elijahcobb.net
Ryan Nuzzo
Ryan “Nuz” Nuzzo is a writer and artist. He has ten years of technical theatre experience and most frequently fulfilled the role of stage manager. He enjoys narrative-heavy games and playing support characters aggressively.
Website: https://nuzart.weebly.com/
Somaiya Rowland
Somaiya is a theatre major with a double concentration in production and performance and a minor in graphic design. They have been a performer, designer, and stage manager for many productions and specialize in creating improvisational performance art. They also work in marketing and project management. They played way too many games as a teen, which has led them to creating work for this project.
Website: https://somaiyarowland.myportfolio.com
Other Founding Members
Lizzie Stark (Editor)
Lizzie Stark is a participation designer, co-editor of the Playable Theater Design Blog, and author of two nonfiction books. She’s designed larps about everything from artists’ colonies and new religions to doomed romance and breast cancer; collaborated with museums and the Kennedy Center; and co-edited two collections of games, #Feminism: A Nano-Game Anthology, and Larps from the Factory, a collection of Norwegian larpscripts. Her most recent site-specific work was Save the Munbax, a Victorian world of fantastic beasts that asked participants to play roles and solve puzzles, co-created with Green Door Labs’ Kellian Pletcher Adams. Find her at LizzieStark.com.
Brandon Sichling
Brandon is a filmmaker, game designer, and writer whose work focuses around marginalization and family. Their work has appeared in film festivals, game festivals, art exhibits, and an anti-recidivism program. Their work springs from an interest in slice-of-life storytelling in genre settings and a desire for reconciliatory justice. They teach in, and are the department head of, the Game Design program at Northeastern University.