Frank Lantz
Frank Lantz is the Director of the NYU Game Center, he has taught game design for over 12 years at NYU, SVA, and Parsons and his writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications.

Frank is a game designer who has worked in the field of game development for the past 20 years. In 2005 he co-founded Area/Code, which created cross-media, location-based, and social network games as well as the popular abstract puzzle game Drop7. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.

Over the past 10 years, Frank helped pioneer the genre of large-scale realworld games, working on projects such as the Big Urban Game, which turned the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul into the world’s largest boardgame; Sharkrunners, which allowed players to interact with living sharks in a persistent virtual world, PacManhattan, a life-size version of the arcade classic created by the students in his Big Games class at NYU, and many other experiments in pervasive and urban gaming.

Mitu Khandaker
Mitu Khandaker is a game designer, scholar, and entrepreneur. She holds a PhD on the aesthetics of interactivity in videogames, completed at the University of Portsmouth in 2015. Prior to that, she was a 2008 Kauffman Global Scholar and received a Masters in Computer Engineering from the University of Portsmouth. A rising star in the games industry, she won the Breakthrough Brit BAFTA in 2013 and the Creative English Trailblazer Award in 2014.

In 2011 Mitu founded The Tiniest Shark Ltd. – an indie micro-studio for which she provides creative, technical, and operational leadership. The Tiniest Shark released Redshirt in 2013, a satirical simulation game that uses science fiction tropes to explore social dynamics. The game received excellent reviews from sources such as Polygon, PC Gamer, and Paste Magazine.

Mitu has been invited to speak at several major conferences and industry events, such as the Game Developers’ Conference, TEDxEastEnd, GamesWest, NineWorlds Conference, and the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. She was a keynote speaker at the 2014 BAFTA Cymru Awards and gave one of the keynotes for the 2015 Global Game Jam. Since 2013, Mitu has served as the STEM/Video Games Ambassador in the UK, where she promotes STEM subjects and game development at schools with a particular interest in advocacy for gender equality in games.

Bennett Foddy
Bennett Foddy is the author of a number of games including his well-known series of four-letter web games QWOP, GIRP and CLOP. His work has been shown at MoMA New York and at the Pulse Art Fair and in dozens of other museums and festivals around the world. He joins NYU’s Game Center as Assistant Arts Professor in game design, following a period at Oxford University and Princeton, where he was a research fellow in the field of moral philosophy, studying the relationship between addiction and free will.

Rob Meyer
Robert has been professionally working as a Game Designer in New York for the last six years and currently works as a Game Designer focused on AI at Avalanche Studios. He attended New York University where he earned his Bachelor’s in Film, Television, and New Media. Notable professional works include the hit puzzle game Color Zen, made at Large Animal Games, and the open-world action-adventure game Just Cause 3, made at Avalanche Studios.

Clara Fernández-Vara
Clara Fernández-Vara is Associate Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center. She is a game scholar, designer and writer. Her work focuses on narrative design, which bridges game design and storytelling. Clara’s videogame work is grounded in the humanities, informed by her background in literature, film and theatre, which she brings to new digital technologies. he has worked on commercial as well as experimental narrative games, such as Symon (2010) or Transcendence: Origins (2014). Her first book, Introduction to Game Analysis, has been published by Routledge.