I’m a career grad student and instructor turned amateur game dev. My interests primarily revolve around narrative and worldbuilding, but I have a soft spot for art and a growing love for production and small-team mentorship.
I’m also currently employed as an Associate Recruiter for the Rocket Science Group, a co-development game studio jointly based between Albany, NY and Cardiff, Wales. While I’ve found success in the role, though, I’m perpetually reluctant to call myself a “recruiter” in name: At the end of the day, my passion isn’t the discipline of recruitment, but rather the general practice of expanding the industry and helping the local and regional games community.
To that end, I still like to think of myself as an “independent scholar” before anything else. My research in that capacity builds upon work I pursued in my previous life: I’m especially interested in visual culture in contemporary Japan, including artistic representations of shape-shifting yōkai and the ways their transformations manifest across print, animated, and interactive media. The way I see it, images of shape-shifters quite literally embody the myriad relationships between human and non-human animals — and in doing so, force us to reconsider our relationships with the environment.