Advisory Board

The ScreenBurn at SXSW Advisory Board is a team of highly qualified individuals who lend their credibility and innovations to help us develop greater social foresight for our conference’s development. They receive status reports on our activities, and respond with advice as to how we can best serve our audience and the industry.

Wagner James Au
nwn.blogs.com
James is author of New World Notes, (nwn.blogs.com), the longest-running Second Life blog, launched during his stint as an “embedded journalist” with Linden Lab, continuing in 2006 as an independent site with Federated Media. He’s also the game / online world editor for GigaOM.com, and author of the upcoming book The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World from HarperCollins, set for a March 2008 publication.

Brandon Boyer
www.offworld.com
www.brandonnn.com
Brandon's wild, pure, simple life has seen him at various times acting as artist, programmer, and indie record label head, as well as writer, columnist and editor for web and print publications like Edge magazine and Gamasutra.com. He has also served numerous times as a judge for Think Services' Independent Games Festival, and as both an advisory board member and speaker at the Austin Game Developers Conference's inaugural Indie Games Summit. Brandon currently oversees Offworld.com, an offshoot of Boing Boing, covering the intersection of the best in independent, mainstream, and iPhone gaming, and the best in art, music and related videogame culture.

Corey Bridges
www.multiverse.net
www.mv-places.com
Responsible for business development and strategic planning at Multiverse, Corey is helping build the world's leading network of interactive entertainment, which includes casual games, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), and 3D virtual worlds.

Over the past year, Corey has overseen development of two ground-breaking projects for the casual game market, Battle and Team Battle, the world's first web-based, multiplayer, real-time combat series. Both titles artfully bring the proven draw of high-end MMO combat to the immediacy and ubiquity of Flash. He has also worked with Coca-Cola and McDonald's on worldwide interactive promotions around James Cameron's movie Avatar. Since the company's beginning, Corey has also helped pioneer the concept of virtual worlds as a new medium that will support a range of applications, including entertainment, education, business collaboration, research, and simulation.

Corey brings experience from some of the most influential companies in the high-tech and entertainment industries, including Netscape, Netflix, Zone Labs, Borland, and The Discovery Channel. In 2003, he was invited to contribute to a U.S. Homeland Security task force on Cyber Security. He also has written and directed a number of short films, and produced commercials and TV specials. An award-winning writer, he has also collaborated with well-known technology expert John Dvorak on multiple books. Corey is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.

Fiona Cherbak
VP, Business Development for GameX
Fiona is Vice President of Business Development for the Games & Media Expo (GameX), an NBC-backed game consumer show and industry conference. Fiona has enjoyed a career in business development, marketing, recruiting and strategic planning for clients in games, entertainment, technology and finance, with her early career spent at The Walt Disney Company and Universal Studios.

Fiona has implemented marketing, PR, event production and advertising campaigns for a multitude of notable corporate and entertainment clients, including Comedy Central, HBO, Fox Broadcasting Corporation, ABC-TV, Time Warner, Nickelodeon, RC Cola and Marvel Comics.

Fiona has worked closely with various professional member societies and organizations such as IEEE, ITSC, AIGA and SIGGRAPH, serving on advisory boards, producing events and handling marketing, fundraising, promotions and PR for numerous national and regional programs.

Fiona is Chairperson for IGDA Women in Games, and advisory board member for SXSW Screenburn, IndieCade, Women in Games International and Austin ACM SIGGRAPH. She serves as a regular speaker and editorialist on diversity hiring issues and career development in the games industry.

Drew Davidson
waxebb.com
Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. He is the Director of ETC, Pittsburgh. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories across texts, comics, games and other media. He completed his Ph.D. in Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, he received a B.A. and M.A. in Communications Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He chaired Game Art & Design and Interactive Media Design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the Art Institute Online and has taught and researched at several universities. He consults for a variety of companies, institutions and organizations and was a Senior Project Manager in the New Media Division of Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He was also a Project Manager in Learning Services at Sapient, and before that he produced interactive media at HumanCode. He is chairing the Sandbox Symposium, an ACM SIGGRAPH conference on video games and serves on the IGDA Education SIG, the ACTlab Steering Committee, and many review boards and jury panels. He founded the Applied Media & Simulation Games Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is Editor of the nascent ETC Press and has written a forthcoming book on narratives across media and is writing another on cross-media communication. Drew is currently advising: ETC|mtvU, Improv II, Animation Studio.

Rodney Gibbs
www.amazeent.com
Rodney is executive studio director of Amaze Entertainment, a full-service game development studio with offices in Austin and Seattle. Specializing in prominent movie-based games, including X-Men, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, Amaze focuses on Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, Xbox 360 and PS3 platforms. Before the gaming bug bit him, he wrote animated and live-action television programs in Los Angeles, worked as an associate producer for PBS television in Chicago, and as a fellow for Time, Inc., Magazines in New York City. A graduate of Leadership Austin, Rodney chairs the Digital Media Council, a workforce development initiative focused on all facets of creative technology. He co-founded Austin’s chapter of Dorkbot, an international salon akin to a science fair with beer. He serves on the boards of Skillpoint Alliance, International Game Developers–Austin, Austin Community College’s Video Game Development Program, and the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce’s AusTech Alliance. After volunteering as a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters for five years, Rodney now serves as vice chair of its board. He created Gamers for Kids’ Sake, an annual game industry fundraiser benefiting the mentoring agency. Rodney received a B.A. from Rice University and a M.F.A in screenwriting from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a James Michener Fellow in the Texas Center for Writers. He is married to Nancy Mims, a textile designer, with whom he has a five-year-old daughter, who is obsessed with Singin’ in the Rain, and a newborn who’s quite fond of nursing.

Aliza Gold
Aliza Gold is the founder and principal of SparkMotive, a new consultancy for project leadership and experience design for new product development and agile environments. Aliza has over 10 years of experience in digital production as a producer and designer, in social networking, video games, and learning domains. Now she’s putting that experience to work for clients needing help with project definition and strategy, user research and requirements development, and production management with multidisciplinary teams. Prior to her founding SparkMotive, Aliza was the program manager of the University of Texas at Austin’s Digital Media Collaboratory (DMC). The DMC collaborates on multi-disciplinary projects with groups in and outside the University to create compelling interactive systems to enhance human performance and improve the social good. Aliza’s final project at the DMC was as product/project manager of Get There Texas, a website in development that bridges communication gaps between Texas students, educators, and employers using social networking technology. Get There Texas was funded by the Texas Workforce Commission. Past projects produced at the DMC include NERO, a video game prototype utilizing innovative artificial intelligence learning research from UT Austin, which won an award at the Independent Games Festival at GDC; and a grant from the National Science Foundation evaluating the feasibility of creating a videogame to teach science inquiry processes to middle school students. Before working with the DMC, Aliza was a producer in the Learning Technologies Group at the award-winning Austin learning and games company Human Code, and later at the e-commerce company Sapient. She created projects pushing the bounds of current technology developing custom learning applications for clients such as PBS, SRI International, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Chris Grant
www.Joystiq.com
Motivated by either an unhealthy Messianic complex or a dearth of career opportunities (he never could decide which), Chris put his college education to good use as a carpenter before becoming editor-in-chief of the popular gaming blog, Joystiq. In that capacity, he's served as an IGF judge, an E3 judge, and a podcast host; interviewed many of the industry's familiar faces, from Bill Gates to John Carmack; spoken at plenty of places, from MIT to GDC, all while reporting on the gaming industry for the world's top gaming blog. If he isn't busy playing or writing about games, he's doing other, no doubt less important, things (though he probably shouldn't be). He hangs his hat in the cultural epicenter of the video game industry. Philadelphia.

Sean Kauppinen
www.ide-agency.com
Sean Kauppinen is the founder and CEO of the International Digital Entertainment Agency. He has more than 15 years of strategic communications and business development expertise in the digital entertainment industry and his ability to bring companies together and provide strategic guidance has led to business growth for industry giants as well as start-ups. During this time Kauppinen has launched more than 400 titles on all major gaming platforms, ranging from big budget blockbusters to value games. He has consulted governments on creating and growing their digital entertainment industries and has served in senior management roles with start-ups and going concerns. Kauppinen has held communications and marketing management positions with Sony Online Entertainment, Ubi Soft, bleem!, and 3dfx.

Kauppinen currently holds advisory board positions with the GDC Europe and multiple early stage companies, and is a regular contributor to Gamers Magazine. He is a former board member of Games Convention Developers Conference and the GC Asia Conference.

Joe Kreiner
www.terminalreality.com
Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Terminal Reality, is a games industry force. Previously an evangelist for 3D graphics, CPU, and peripheral technologies in gaming – he’s now focused on licensing for the Infernal Game Engine. Past companies include Texas Instruments/3Dlabs, Cyrix, STMicroelectronics/PowerVR and Logitech. In recognition of his contributions to the games industry, Joe has special thanks credits in more than thirty titles spread over the last ten years. Joe is the founder of the Dallas chapter of the IGDA(International Game Developers Association), running it for more than five years before turning it over to a dedicated group of volunteers. Joe holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Penn State University.

Stephanie Morgan
www.ngmoco.com
Stephanie’s love for games, technology, and cutting-edge industries lead her to her current role as a producer at ngmoco:), creator and publisher of games exclusively for the iPhone and iPod Touch. At ngmoco, she has worked on Star Defense, Topple 2, and WordFu, among other titles. Prior to that, Stephanie was Studio Director at Hands-On Mobile, exploring the boundaries between web and traditional mobile by developing cross-platform, multiplayer games such as World Poker Tour and Guitar Hero World Tour. A veteran of the mobile games industry, Stephanie has also founded a dot com (way back in the day), worked on a number of independent films, and successfully survived as a professional card player.

Evan Van Zelfden
vanzelfden.com
As a journalist, Mr Van Zelfden writes exclusively about the business of games, for publications varying from the Austin Chronicle to the Economist Magazine. Games, he asserts, are the greatest intersection of Business and Art (with a capital A). He regularly contributes industry coverage to Next-Generation and Gamasutra, with his content syndicated by BusinessWeek.

Margaret Wallace
rebelmonkey.com
Margaret Wallace is an entrepreneur and video game professional. In 2007, she became co-founder and CEO of Rebel Monkey, a company focused on bringing new kinds of immersive experiences to casual gamers. Named by Next Generation as one of the Game Industry’s 100 Most Influential Women in 2006, she also served on the Steering Committee for the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Casual Games Special Interest Group for three years. During that time, she was also a Co-Editor of the 2006 IGDA Casual Games White Paper. Before Rebel Monkey, Ms. Wallace was CEO of Skunk Studios, a casual game developer based in San Francisco. Prior to that, she produced, designed and contributed to various online games and “creativity” applications while at Shockwave.com. Ms. Wallace also created and contributed to CD-ROM and online content for Dogz and Catz (currently published by Ubisoft) while at Mindscape and at PF.Magic.

Tony Walsh
www.PhantomCompass.com
Tony Walsh has been playing, modifying, and developing games for over 30 years. He has helped plan and execute story-driven interactive projects since the early 1990s, including four award-winning extended-TV games. In 2008, Walsh founded Phantom Compass, a Toronto-based game production company. He leads the company in providing products and services to broadcasters and media producers in Canada, the US and UK.

A multi-disciplined creative, Walsh has become internationally recognized for his work at the intersection of games and culture. A former game design instructor at George Brown College and Centennial College in Canada, he is currently a Professional Associate of the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and is affiliated with the Interactive / Media / Design program at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, The Netherlands.