Steve Derrick, Group Manager, Handheld Art, Vicarious Visions

Steve joined Vicarious Visions in 1999 as a texture artist and is currently the Art Group Manager. In this capacity he supervises and trains over twenty seven artists and animators and oversees onsite art contractors. Steve also has trained offsite contractors and art directs outsourced GBA projects. Steve is actively involved in GDC and has spoken on art processes and artist management (2001-2004). Steve has served as a jury member for the Sketches Jury in Animation as sub chair and ...more

Demetri Detsaridis, Game Designer, Gameloft

Demetri Detsaridis serves as Game Designer for Gameloft, a leading international developer and publisher of games for mobile phones. Mr. Detsaridis' career spans four years in the game industry as well as four years of film and television production, with experience as a writer, game designer and producer. In addition to his current position designing games for wireless platforms, he has also worked on PC, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, GBA and web-based applications. ...more

Nick Fortugno, Designer, gameLab

Nick Fortugno is a Game Designer at gameLab, where he has been a designer, writer, and project manager on dozens of digital and non-digital game projects, most recently serving as Lead Designer on the downloadable hit Diner Dash. Nick was inducted into role-playing life at the age of five, and has been an avid consumer and producer of role-playing , live-action and game culture ever since. He founded and ran the Seasons of Darkness group, a 5 1/2 year live action project which was featured on Showtime and ...more

Keith Halper, CEO, Kuma Reality Games

Keith Halper is the Chief Executive Officer of Kuma Reality Games. Keith is a recognized leader in interactive gaming with dozens of industry awards and key successes with many of the world's most significant brands, including Shrek, Jerry Seinfeld, Tom Clancy and Star Trek. Keith was President of media services firm, Medium Rare, Inc., where his clients included Viacom, AOL Time Warner, Yahoo and Dennis Publishing's Maxim Magazine. ...more

Matt Hawkins, Game Designer, Pixeljump

Matthew Hawkins hails from the Pacific Northwest, and came to New York City to study cartooning and film production at the School of Visual Arts. Shortly after graduating, Matt first became involved with video games when he was hired by Ubi Soft to be the head game designer for its New York studio. There he designed and developed a number of games for the internet and major gaming consoles, consulted on various other titles in development, and ...more

Dan Kitchen, VP, Product Development, Majesco

Daniel Kitchen is a 23-year veteran of the videogame and interactive multimedia industry. After a career as one of the youngest successful senior designers at Activision, he was Co-founder and Executive Vice President of Product Development for Absolute Entertainment Inc., a publicly held entertainment software development and publishing firm. Since 1979, Mr. Kitchen has been responsible for over 100 commercially successfully games across a variety of platforms. ...more

Nick Laing, Producer, Hypnotix

Nick started his Art Career before graduating high school, working for local film companies as a story board artist and as a penciler for independent comic publishers. Following his dream for higher education in art, he sacrificed his Fire Fighting/Football/Teaching/Coaching/Advertising Art/Graphic Design studies in Scottsdale, AZ for a more focused academic pursuit of sequential story telling from the Joe Kubert School in Northern NJ.

Brad MacDonald, Art Director, Large Animal

Brad MacDonald has taken a long, circuitous route to his position as Art Director for Large Animal Games. Over the past 14 years he has worked as political cartoonist, comic book illustrator, animator, product designer, and website developer for clients such as MTV, Nickelodeon, the NFL, Busta Rhymes, CNBC, Tommy Hilfiger and the SciFi channel. The diversity of his clientele allowed him to design for a broad range of audiences and mediums ...more

Katie Salen, Director MFA Design & Technology, Parsons School of Design

Katie Salen is a designer interested in the connections between game design, interactivity, and play. She wears many hats, including the directorship of the graduate Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design, and works as a designer and consultant on a range of game-related projects for clients such as MSN, SIGGRAPH, the Hewlett Foundation, XMediaLab, the Design Institute, the Director's Guild of America, mememe Productions, and others. ...more

Jason Schreiber, CEO, Powerhead Games

Jason Schreiber has more than a dozen years of experience in the interactive industry and has successfully shipped more than 50 SKUs. He has both run his own game development studio and served as head of production for a small video game publisher. He has shown his flexibility and versatility working on titles ranging in diversity from the original Unreal to the licensed Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen properties. He also lectures at Columbia University for a course in game development.

Michael Sweet, Creative Director/Composer, Audiobrain

Composer and sound designer Michael Sweet has won numerous Awards for his continued innovation and exploration of audio including the BDA Promax Award for Best Sound for a Network Package (HBO Zone) the Best Audio Award at the GDC IGF, and nominations for three 2004 GANG awards. Educated at Berklee College of Music, Michael is the creative director of Audiobrain, a unique collection of artists dedicated to breaking boundaries in interactive music. ...more