~ CURRENT GAME LAB FOLKS ~
Eddo Stern
Eddo Stern works on the disputed borderlands between fantasy and reality, exploring the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation. He works with new modes of narrative and documentary, experimental game design, fantasies of technology and history, and cross-cultural representation. At the Design | Media Arts Department he teaches courses on game design and culture; computer game development; and physical computing in an art context.
Jenna Caravello
Jenna Caravello is an artist who makes experimental video games, interactive installations, and short animated films. She seeks out humanity, absurdity, and vulnerability where computer culture, folklore, and analog mundanity intersect. Jenna holds an MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts and teaches classes in the Design Media Arts department at UCLA.
Tyler Stefanich
Tyler Stefanich received his Masters of fine arts in Media Art from UCLA. His work has a fascination with invention and reinvention, altering objects such as a vintage television or an oscilloscope. His work draws on memory and unconscious habits of interpretation, using analog/digital-technologies to dislodge the viewer’s sense of normalcy.
David O’Grady
David O'Grady is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media studies who researches and writes on documentary film, Wes Anderson and video games. His dissertation is investigating video game interfaces and their implications for the experience of play. David also sometimes scribbles on his blog at erraticplay.com.
Danny Snelson
Danny Snelson is writing games and gaming writing. At UCLA, he teaches and works between the Departments of English and Design | Media Arts. Interests include file formats, experimental poetry, tabletop RPGs, media poetics, VR exercise, emerging genres, queer comics, internet vernaculars, walking simulators, and multiplayer co-op games of all stripes. In courses and compositions, he attends to new modes of collaboration, play, and circulation.
Sam Malabre
Sam is a grad student in Design | Media Arts. They're currently making work about US imperialism, escapist fantasy, and the intersection between the two. At the Game Lab, they game master and research tabletop roleplaying games.
Game Lab Affiliated Faculty
UCLA DESIGN MEDIA ARTS (MFA '22)
John Brumley
John graduated with an MFA in Design Media Arts at UCLA. He received his BA in Music Composition from UC Davis. He has worked in radio, live performance, and photoshop. Interests include sound transduction, virtual/reality, media assimilation, and melting.
Ray Hsiao
Ray is a computer science undergraduate who somehow made their way to the Game Lab. They are interested in making games based on the idea of "ludonarrative consistency", whatever that means. Having a background oriented towards working in industry, Ray is also curious about how their perspective towards game design can be challenged and reshaped. Outside of making/playing games, Ray likes to draw, read, and observe animals.
Xiner Lan
Xiner Lan is a multi-media artist who constructs worlds where different modes of realities converge - the magic with the mundane, the imagined with the experienced. Using video, game, performance, installation, and their combination, the artist tells stories based on the self-defined “script” - a drafted, executable sequence with theatrical potential. Rehearsing and enacting the script in a split of voices, Xiner explores meaning-making amid the contradiction and fragmentation of fiction, translation, autotheory, and poetry.
Evan Ibarra
Evan Ibarra is a film undergrad and multidisciplinary artist who makes games that explore the boundaries of social taboo. With a background in screenwriting and archival practice, he is interested in exploring how games function as a medium for storytelling and empathy. Outside of games, Evan is a prolific zine maker, concert photographer, and trans radio personality. She loves cats, cooking and meaningless arguments about things that don’t matter.
Sagan Yee
Sagan Yee restlessly perpetrates animation, video games, speculative fiction, computational poetry, and interactive miscellany. From 2016 to 2020, they were the executive director of Hand Eye Society, a video game arts organization in Toronto. He came to Los Angeles to get an MFA and complain about the lack of bike infrastructure.
Chong Xu
Chong Xu is an artist interested in gestures of communicating between humans and digital devices from a phenomenological perspective. He works on digital performance, installation, and web. He has a background in the School of Visual Arts BFA and D|MA graduate program. He also typed these words with his keyboard upside down.
Game Lab Resident
UCLA DESIGN MEDIA ARTS (MFA '24)
Katie Kang
Katie Kang is a Design Media Arts undergrad and Environmental Systems and Society minor interested in making work that explicates the world by looking at the absurd, sad, but beautiful people of ‘everydayness’. When I’m not making work, I’m busy adding books to my Amazon cart.
Game Lab Resident
UCLA DESIGN MEDIA ARTS (BA '23)
Aidan Strong
Aidan Strong is a game designer with a mixed background in Mathematics and Computer Science. He's passionate about social justice games and inclusive design. His recent works explore the boundary between real and artificial content, as well as what motivates players to continue playing.
Migle Koste Railaite
Miglė is a Design Media Art and Art undergrad student. She is interested in bridging her fine art practice in sculpture, ceramics and installation with role playing games. In her work Miglė explores topics of mysticism, femininity, mythology and her Eastern European heritage. Through her practice she aims to inspire introspection, deeper relationships and self awareness.
Elliot Bear Yu
Elliot Bear Yu is a multi-mixed-media artist, PhD dropout, and all around cool guy. He is passionate about all forms of experimentation, from pushing the edge of traditional scholarship to trying, and usually failing, to work in new mediums.
Vinny Roca
Vinny Roca is a game maker and graduate student at UCLA DMA. He makes unstable game-attempts to see for himself what video games might do. Using his past experiences in 3D art, drawing and media theory, as well as a no-holds-barred approach to making, he creates detailed, silly, and absurdist games about nothing in particular.
Hyun Cho
Hyun Cho(She/Her) is a Seoul-based artist and a game maker. Cho makes games about everyday life. Cho does not view the relationship between technology and humans as oppositional but as closely related entities which continuously play a role in one another's change. Since humans created technology, she views technology as not solely technological and seeks to reveal the 'human-ness within the layers of technology.
Hua Chai
Hua is a gender-glitched entity who is said to be "too powerful, too uninterpretable." They enjoy exploring the nuanced fluidity of identity and transcending imaginary boundaries of gender, nationality and language. Their independent animations and video games have been showcased at Singapore, Australia and USA.
Wiley Wiggins
Wiley Wiggins is a student and artist with an interest in interactive media. Prior to beginning schooling, He worked as an actor in several films (Dazed and Confused, Computer Chess), as a user interface designer, and as producer of the Fantastic Arcade international games festival.
Eunice Choi
Eunice Choi is an artist and designer who creates objects as an instrument to understand the experience we take for granted in our daily lives. Her installations often have an intuitive call for play and are activated by audiences’ bodies. She is interested in exploring materials, metaphors, relationships, emotions, and vulnerability. Her hidden skill is finding four-leaf clovers and having too many tabs open.
Michael Luo
Michael Luo is a game lover and a game maker. He has a background in fine art and business economics. He is also a self-proclaimed illustrator and master cook. His work aims to explore the multi-narrative of history and of the future in literature, film, and other games in a hallucinatory, yet sharp way. But for most of the time he just ends up playing way too much video games and watching way too many films.
Jonathan Cecil
Jonathan Cecil is a visual artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. He received a BA in Studio Art from University of California Santa Barbara. Jonathan's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums including Donna Beam Gallery at University of Nevada Las Vegas and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. His work is in public collections including The Getty Center.
Alexander James Ricket
Alex Rickett is a game maker and interactive installation artist. He received a B.S. in computer science from the University of Washington in 2010, and a computer graphics focused M.S. from UCLA in 2013. He is also an active researcher at the UCLA Game Lab, composer of dissonant electro-pop, and maker of found object sculpture. Synthesizing these interests he seeks to diffuse games into new and unfamiliar contexts thematically, functionally, and aesthetically.
Lena NW
Lena NW creates games that explore the intersection of identity, sexuality, gender, and technology. She is interested in the way internet culture proliferates self-commodification, exploitation, fandoms, trolling, desensitization and cultural displacement. Her games investigate ethically contentious scenarios where there are no protocols for response. As an adolescent, she was deeply moved by games on newgrounds.com like “Franks Adventure” and “Orgasm Girl”, and has known since then that game development was her destiny.
Miller Klitsner
Miller mutilates old toys and deconstructs old games with power tools to build new ones so that they may inherit the hearts of the children whose parents once cherished the abominations' previous forms. His experience building machines and constructing game-systems is now slowly melding with his love for storytelling and human observation in an event known by many as The Phlegmatic Intrusion, one of thirteen separate events that interweave with the larger body-conscience narrative.
Sofia Staab-Gulbenkian
Sofia is a UCLA English / DMA double major and knowledge hoarder. She is afraid of the internet and likes asking you invasive questions about your stuff. Her games use too much text and her favorite word is "gross".
Game Lab Resident
UCLA Design Media Arts (BA '18)
Nick Crockett
Nick is a game designer/developer and a recent graduate of the Design | Media Arts program. His interests include running, punching, Christmas shopping, and breaking your fancy iPad.
~ GAME LAB ALUMNI ~
Adeline Ducker
Adeline Ducker explores narrative in media through games, animation, and film. She is intrigued by trends in society and expresses her observations through figurative imagery or story. Her work is influenced by all things horror, fantastical, and even downright strange.
Ahmed El Shaer
Ahmed El Shaer is a multi-disciplinary artist from Egypt has a particular interest in Video Games as an art form. His videos combine Machinima, stock footage, 3D animation, and experimental soundscapes. His art projects include video installation, photography and video games. His Reseach about the development of digital artistic expression for artist's world through Video Game arts.
Aliah Magdalena Darke
Aliah is a Design | Media Arts graduate student with a passion for novelty and invention. She is interested in trap doors, moving bookcases, worn leather journals and the pursuit of unfathomable treasure.
Amanda Ho
Amanda Ho is an Aerospace Engineering student interested in building spacecraft designed to further the cause of human exploration into space or the acquisition of scientific knowledge. Besides rocketry and other space-related things, she is also interested in technology in the application of art and indie game development. She will occasionally find her way up to Broad to nap on the Game Lab couch.
Andrew Kim
"Andrew has an individual field of concentration called Design | Engineering which combines the Design | Media Arts and Mechanical Engineering disciplines. He is fascinated with the design of physical, interactive objects and his work is centered on physical consumer products. In the lab, he is interested in designing unconventional physical games and gaming technology.
Angela Washko
Angela Washko is an artist devoted to creating forums for discussions about feminism in hostile spaces. A recent recipient of the Creative Capital Award, her projects have been presented internationally at venues including Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki, Finland), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Milan Design Triennale. Angela Washko is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Anna Reutinger
Anna Reutinger has an undergraduate degree from UCLA's D|MA department
Annamaria Andrea Vitali
Andrea is a design PhD candidate from Politecnico di Milano. Her research investigates videogames for meaningful play and aesthetic experiences. While defining a theoretical model, she is currently exploring how aesthetics, perceptive and intangible languages of digital medium contribute to meaningful play and player’s sense making processes by designing some experimental games.
Anton Bobkov
Anton Bobkov studied graduate-level math at UCLA. He likes power metal, the Harry Potter series, and oversized tea cups. In video games, he looks for complex game mechanics and interconnected storylines. He enjoys programming AI for games and never misses a chance to put a ridiculously complicated simulation into any piece of code.
Aram Bartholl
Aram Bartholl's work creates an interplay between internet, culture and reality. How do our taken-for-granted communication channels influence us? Bartholl asks not just what humans are doing with media, but what media is doing with humans. Tensions between public and private, online and offline, techno-lust and everyday life are at the core of his work and his public interventions and installations, often entailing surprisingly physical manifestations of the digital world, challenge our concepts of reality and incorporeality.
Bijun Liang
Interested in narrative and multidisciplinary work, Bijun is particularly attracted to the interactive and world-building nature of game design. Currently, she enjoys using food as a leeway to comment on anything.
Bob Frederick
Bob Frederick is a designer and has graduated with an MFA from the UCLA Architecture department. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Kentucky. Working on projects at firms in Los Angeles and New York, he has developed an interest in 3d modeling and visual production.
Bryan Wuest
Bryan Wuest studied in the graduate program of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Theater, Film, and Television at UCLA. His interests lie in both video game theory and design. He'd like to explore how narrative and affect are composed and controlled through gameplay, and the experience this creates for the player. He is also a pretty good baker.
Chris Reilly
Chris Reilly is an artist, writer, hacker and teacher. Chris received his BFA with a focus on New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. His artwork incorporates a range of media including video games, kinetic sculpture and robots.
Christina Curlee
Christina "Phazero" Curlee is a new media artist specializing in game development. They create experimental games and installations with themes exploring psychology, philosophy and art theory. They're proudly an IGDA Women in Games Ambassador and a purveyor of Artgames.
Colin Smith-Clark
Colin is a cognitive psychology instructor and researcher. He studies learning and memory, and is interested in how games and game developers take advantage of learning mechanisms, as well as how embodiment, or bodily experiences, can affect things.
Costas Sideris
A PhD student of UCLA Computer Science, who researched at UCLA under Demetri Terzopoulos and Petros Faloutsos (York University, Toronto). He earned his Bachelor's in Computer & Electrical Engineering at National Technical University of Athens,Greece. His graduate work focused on Human & Computer Interaction as well as physical simulations, animation and computer vision. He was a member of the UCLA Computer Graphics & Vision Laboratory. He enjoys skiing and surfing.
David Elliott
David Elliott has an MFA from the UCLA Design Media Arts department, a background in photography from International Center of Photography in New York and fine art from San Francisco Art Institute. He is a former manager of the UCLA Game Lab.
David Gao
David is an undergraduate in the department of Design | Media Arts and Geography. He is interested in geospatial technology and how geography and maps could be integrated into games. He has recent interests include sound and electronics.
David Mershon
David Mershon likes to make unorthodox video games on unremarkable hardware platforms. He portrays situations which are absurd, but not senseless. He prefers reproducible mass media to uniquely instantiated art objects. He believes in the new sincerity
Former Game Lab ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
USC Interactive Media and Games (MFA '02)
David Wicks
David Wicks is an artist exploring landscape systems and our relationship to the environment. David earned an MFA from UCLA Design Media Arts in 2011. David uses manual and computational processes to sample, interpret, and synthesize new forms from the physical world. These processes yield maps, drawings, animations, and games.
Elsie Wang
Elsie Wang is a happy game developer. Her biggest wish is to have a hamster in her apartment or a hedgehog.
Former Game Lab UNDERGRADUATE FELLOW
UCLA DESIGN MEDIA ARTS (BA '21)
Esther Abosch
Esther is a Design Media Arts major and history nerd who makes things the good old fashioned/stupidly difficult way. Currently, her focus is in historical narratives and historicism in games, and the ways in which the medium can help or hinder historical study. Her hobbies include printmaking, sewing, painting, and the random Wikipedia article button. She hopes that someday she can figure out a way to cram all of these things into one big ol’ game.
Eugene Wang
Eugene Wang is a developer interested in exploring unconventional game mechanics and control schemes. He is passionate about aquarium design, extra hot golden curry blocks, and adaptive AI systems.
Faith Myhra
Faith Myhra attained a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies at the University of California, Irvine and has an MA in Urban Sustainability Masters of Arts at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her thesis focused on bridging the gap between video gamers and electronic waste recycling issues. Her hopes are not only to bring sustainable concepts to video games but also to showcase the value of video gamers to those within the sustainability movement.
Farhan Alam
Farhan Alam is a developer that is interested in web technologies and video game design. He wants to learn more about the interactions between the artists/designers and programmers when developing projects. He is also really bad at Darks Souls PvP.
Garrett Johnson
Independent major from the design department with an interest in both programming and art direction related to game design and development. He has worked in the game lab developing independent projects.
Former Game Lab RESIDENT
UCLA Independent Game Development (BA '12)
Gautam Rangan
Gautam Rangan has a BA in Art History and Biology from UC Berkeley. He has created animations for eleven different professors at UC Berkeley, the Discovery Science channel, and the Connecticut Science Center.
Gottfried Haider
Gottfried Haider was born in 1985 in Vienna, Austria. He is a self-taught computer programmer, and joined the Vienna University of Applied Arts in 2005 to work and research in the field of computer arts. His main areas of interest are urban soundscape theory, algorithmically dealing with space, and ways of making code accessible to the audience.
Gregg Tavares
Gregg is an old skool game designer programmer who started making games in 1979 in 8th grade. His first commercial game was Centipede for C64. Other popular titles include Crash Team Racing and Locoroco. He loves video games and is really excited about exploring new tech and the ideas it opens up. His research at the lab consists of exploring what can be done with his party game system, HappyFunTimes.
Haja Azzam
Hajar is an aspiring designer and media artist. She finds joy in creating animation and digital illustrations, along with building interactive installations with VR and AR to share stories. Her work is centered around themes of psychology, children, and minorities.
Former Game Lab Undergraduate Fellow
UCLA DESIGN MEDIA ARTS (BA '20)
Hayley Greenhalgh
Hayley Greenhalgh graduated from Design/Media Arts at UCLA and focused on motion graphics, animation, and interactive media. She likes comics, science fiction and pretty old books. She hates weedwhackers and black licorice. She'll play any game that has an interesting story or incredible art (preferably both), but she'll also settle for nostalgia.
Heather Penn
Heather Penn is a designer and artist living in Los Angeles. Check out her game Overland and other various personal projects in her spare time. If you're interested in keeping up with her work check out http://momoss.tumblr.com
Hye Min Cho
Hye Min Cho is a media artist who uses custom graphic software to visualize the experiences at odd with the normal and the legitimate. She aims to explore the areas of computer graphics that are often left unexplored by the industry and the academia which heavily focus on realism. Hye Min holds a B.Sc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
Isabelle Chen
Isabelle has worked as both a 3D generalist and a technical artist in entertainment industry, as well as procedural programming, in addition to her current focus in motion capture equipment.
Isla Hansen
The first electronic game Isla ever played was Cookie Monster Counter. Her height has developed in direct inverse correlation to the size of a hard disk drive ever since! Isla’s work absurdly reinterprets the way camera and robotic systems have developed by positioning the human body as analogue. She breaks down processes of mediation in order to complicate the relationship between the human body and technological progress. Isla received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015.
Jingjie Chen
Jingjie Chen is interested in using technology to explore the intersections of dream and reality, memories and emotions to create worlds and expressions that can expose phenomenon of our consciousness that we ourselves are unaware of.
Jocelyn Favela
Jocelyn Favela is a creator interested in being part of the wonderful world of art and animation, with a particular predilection to stop motion animation, illustration, and fabrication.
Former Game Lab Undergraduate Fellow
UCLA Chicana/o Studies (BA '19)
Jodi Cheung
Jodi Cheung makes interactive installations, kinetic sculptures and participatory (machine/artist) performances using low-tech electronics, games, and drawing. She graduated with a BFA (Sculpture and Spatial Practice) from VCA, The University of Melbourne. She also holds a diploma in Fine Arts from Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, where she was trained as a sculptor.
Jonathan Bae
Jonathan Bae is a high school senior with a deep interest for game development, logo design and creative writing. He has earned a Young Authors Award in 2006, listens to slam death metal and has a constant craving for tacos. In his free time, he plays competetive computer games at a semi-serious level and freehands symmetrical logos. He plays World of Warcraft, earning 'Insane in the Membrane' in 2009.
Former Game Lab Intern
Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools
Joshua Nuernberger
Joshua Nuernberger holds an undergradute degree in Design | Media Arts who is interested in illustration, narrative, film, and gaming. His work has been featured at the Independent Games Festival (Game Developers Conference), IndieCade @ E3, Indie Games Arcade (Eurogamer Expo), and in PCGamer and Game Developer Magazine.
Judy Apple Kim
Judy Apple Kim grew up observing her mom go from barely tolerating the existence of games to being the fiercest and most accomplished gamer in the family. It gave her a strong appreciation for the potential power of games on anyone’s life, and she hopes to combine her cognitive science and art backgrounds to contribute to games that make the world a cooler place.
Jules Kris
Jules Kris is an artist & technologist who uses software "incorrectly" to invent alternative interfaces for their body when mainstream technologies fail them. Jules’ works have been featured at museums and festivals in the United States, including the UCLA Game Art Festival at the Hammer Museum, Indiecade Festival, LA Weekly Artopia, and CultureHub LA.
Jumo Yang
Jumo Yang is a lover of all fields of art and design. His main focus is storytelling in any medium and concept design. His works explore possible ways of storytelling through the combination of visual, audio, textual and tactual information.
Justin Rabanales
Coming from the UCLA Community Schools, Justin Rabanales is a high school senior with an ever-growing passion for game development and computer science. He achieved a Science Award in 2008 for having the highest science score in LAUSD. He is a Sith Lord in "Star Wars the Old Republic". When he isn't being a Sith Lord he is a COG Soldier, a Dragonborn or a Clone Trooper. His music taste falls with anything that sounds like the band DOPE.
Former Game Lab Intern
Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools
Kate Hollenbach
Kate Hollenbach is a graduate student in Design Media Arts. Her work explores the relationship between technology, gesture, and motion. Chrono Trigger is her favorite game of all time.
Kelly Chu
Kelly Chu is a designer with an affinity for print and object-making. Every now and then, she designs for the web and tells stories with videos. She graduated from UCLA in the Design | Media Arts program with a minor in Art History.
Kerry Lee
Kerry Lee is an aspiring animator/illustrator/sculptor/modeler/designer/editor/aquarist/gardener. He likes making stuff.
Kit Kirby
Kit Kirby is a designer, artist, half-troll madwoman who employs absurdity and dark humor to create art about identity and expectation. A recent arrival from the east coast, Kit has a degree in Graphic Design from Boston University and a Post-Baccalaureate in Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Arts. Just like the Kirby Nintendo character, she is round, adorable and utter chaos in Super Smash Brothers.
Kristin McWharter
Kristin McWharter is a multi- disciplinary artist whose work interrogates the relationship between competition and intimacy. Her research explores where personal experiences of awkwardness manifest from within both individual and group perspectives. She uses immersive sculptural installations, videos, and viewer- inclusive performances to blur the boundaries of social intimacy and personal narrative in an effort to invoke viewer’s individual relationships to affection, antagonism, sincerity and discomfort.
Kristyn Solie
kyttenjanae (Kristyn Solie) is a Design | Media Arts Alumni and former Game Lab Resident. Her interests include experimental media, interactivity, the color pink, old computers, animals, plants, places, and things. She makes animations and small games. You can check out her blog here.
L Tusman
L Tusman is a new media artist and curator interested in the application of the radical ethos of collectives and DIY culture to the creation of, aesthetics, and open-source distribution methods of digital culture. His artistic output includes interactive media, video art, net art, experimental videogames, sound art, websites, twitter bots and pirate radio stations. Many of his works feature themes of self-identity, mistranslation and new methods of communication in contemporary internet culture.
Lander
Lander is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in the convergence of theory, games and fine-art. He has worked with motion graphics design for television, Audio-Visual and I.T. support for University, as well as in social services for marginalized populations. His art reflects interests in outsiders, misfits, complex conceptual structures, humor and discomfort.
Lea Schönfelder
Lea Schönfelder is an animator and game designer. She has graduated from Baden-Wuerttemberg Film Academy and was a visiting artist in residence at the UCLA Game Lab. Her games often deal with questions surrounding gender, ethics, documentary, and everyday experience and in turn spark public debate. For example the Russian Parliament discussed to ban her game "Ulitsa Dimitrova" from the Russian audience.
Liam Allman
Liam is a complex synthetic life form from the distant future, sent back to play the part of an undergrad with interests in tabletop game design and character work (and the combination of the two: old school RPGs) until his robot overlords instruct him otherwise. His complex runtimes drive him to write articles about tabletop gaming, when he is not busy recharging his solar cells in the sculpture garden or interfacing with the primitive computing devices of the present.
Former Game Lab Resident
UCLA Design Media Arts (BA '13)
Marisa Ling
Marisa Ling is a designer and multidisciplinary artist from San Francisco. She specializes in user experience design, visual design, and illustration. Her work focuses on bringing unexpected delight and surreal absurdity to everyday experiences through a wide range of mediums. Whatever it is that Marisa is making next, you can be sure to expect fresh horrors.
Mark Essen
Mark Essen is a game designer who lives in Los Angeles and is graduated with an MFA from UCLA's Design and Media Arts program. His work has been exhibited at FILE in Sao Paulo, the New Museum in New York, MoCCA in Toronto, FACT, [DAM] Berlin, Vice/Intel's international Creators Project, and various other galleries, festivals, and basements.
Matthias Dörfelt
Matthias Dörfelt is a Los Angeles-based artist. He mainly works in software producing artifacts ranging from drawings, prints, animation, videos and interactive installations to robotics. In his works he often trades control in favor of surprise because he strongly believes in computation as an expressive, playful and humorous tool. Matthias will continue to explore these aspects by infusing technology with flaws, naivety and weirdness. He believes in a media arts practice that favors spontaneity over streamlining and hopes that his works contribute to shape our relationship to machines in a similar way.
Mubbasir Kapadia
Mubbasir Kapadia pursued a PhD in the Computer Science Department at UCLA. He has also been a joint member of the Modeling, Animation and Graphics Lab (MAGIX) as well as the Game Lab, and aspires to inject his research in computer animation and artificial intelligence into making innovative and experimental games.
Nikki Woo
Nikki is a developer with a passion for software, graphic design, and smiling. Though she is not the most experienced gamer, she enjoys observing the visual and technical intricacies of a variety of games- especially those based in story, action, and strategy. In her life, she hopes to find and taste the best donut in the world but, for now, she'll settle for Randy's.
Noa P. Kaplan
Noa P. Kaplan is an artist and teacher living in Los Angeles, California. Her work examines micro-cosmic architectures and the impact of technology on production processes, material structure, and scale.
Oscar Moralde
Oscar Moralde is a doctoral candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. He investigates the phenomenology and ideology of video games and other digital media, along with responses to technoculture and neoliberalism in world cinema. He is also a lecturer at the California Institute of the Arts, and his writing can be found in Well Played Journal, Latin American Perspectives, Media Fields Journal, and the Criterion Collection.
Patrick Michael Ballard
Patrick Michael Ballard is an artist that develops techniques for revealing endangered processes of nuance in gradients of nonsense. He makes speculative dowsing rods, symbolic resonators and sonic atmospheres for the orchestration of games and performance works. His process integrates puppetry, writing, collaborative stewardship of objects, and acts of whimsical care to hybridize fantasy with uncanny intimacy for tuning collective story-organs.
Former Game Lab Artist-in-residence
Pete Hawkes
Pete Hawkes explores the potential of natural patterns and processes in art and learning. He received a BFA in Graphic Design from Brigham Young University and has taught interactive design at Utah Valley University and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Pete has over 10 years of interactive design and motion experience working with a wide range of clients including Ogilvy Interactive, KFC, Liz Claiborne, JWT, and the Sci-Fi Channel.
Peter Lu
Peter Lu has been inspired by the likes of other independent games to be a developer himself. He wants to bring back a sense of continuity that seems lost in so many "designed by committee" games that currently flood the market. Peter believes that developers should be in control of the tools used to create creative content instead of letting the tools dictate creative boundaries. He has since made several games and continues to work on new games.
Philip Scott
Philip Scott has always found a strange comfort in increasingly complex rulesets. Whether in physical games, interaction design, or sound synthesis, Phil is fascinated by the infinite possibilities provided by intertwining sets of instructions. He is currently exploring generative forms as they relate to electronic music and interactivity, and hopes to one day discover the kind of techno that the deep sea squid listens to.
Pinar Yoldas
Pinar is a recipient of Eugene Wurzel Memorial Scholarship and Clifton Webb Scholarship from the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA.
Refik Anadol
He is a media artist and designer working in the fields of live audio/visual performance, immersive installations and architectural photography, particularly his works explores the space among digital and physical by creating a relationship between architecture and media arts. He holds an MFA from UCLA’s Design Media Arts Department.
Regina Wang
Regina is a software developer who is passionate about the combination of education with computer science and is interested in creating meaningful, easily accessible games and applications that change viewpoints while also being entertaining or useful. Her projects include educational games and other accessible utilitarian software for students.
Sam Bom
He loves to write, and tries living up to European stereotypes with coffee, cigarettes and a weird accent. A graduate student from the field of comparative literature on exchange at UCLA, working on an interpretive framework for studying games as meaning-generating objects of culture. Writes weird short fictions, and is fascinated by the experience of storytelling.
Samson Klitsner
This is Samson Klitsner, and that is a bathtub made of free stuff from craigslist. Interested in the intersection of interactivity, sound, and physical space, Samson is a creator of digital and physical experiences.
Sara Drake
Sara Drake is a new_media artist, animator & friend living in Los Angeles, CA.
Sean Soria
Sean Soria does not have an evil twin, but easily finds others to play as second player. He enjoys video games with intriguing plots and computer programming. He's managed to combine his love of video games and programming at the UCLA Game Lab. In his free time he's also pursued his PhD in the Computer Science department at UCLA.
Former Game Lab RESIDENT
UCLA Computer Science (MA '13)
Seph Li
Sephiroth is a programmer, a graphic designer, and he makes video games. After graduating from Tsinghua University in Beijing with bachelor's degrees in Computer Software and Digital Entertainment Design, he obtained an MFA degree in Design|Media Arts. Sephiroth is deadly interested in making projects on exploring the relationship between information technology and people's everyday life.
Stalgia Grigg
Stalgia Grigg is a graduate student in Design Media Arts. Stalgia received his B.S. from Purchase College where he studied studio art and computer science. He is interested in how games inform the stories we tell ourselves about our agency. Stalgia wades through this topic by making interactive projects that have disappointment as their win-condition.
Stephen Mamber
Stephen Mamber teaches in the Cinema and Media Studies Program of the Theater, Film, and Television school at UCLA. His Digital Media courses include the seminars "Issues in Electronic Culture", "Computer Applications for Film Studies", and "Videogame Theory." His film courses include classes on narrative theory, visual analysis, directors and genres, and many other subjects.
Former Game Lab TFT LIAISON
UCLA Theater Film and Television Faculty
Steven Amrhein
Steven Amrhein recently graduated from UCLA with a BA in Design/Media Arts and a minor in Film, and is currently working on a series of woodblock prints while pursuing migrant farming. As a designer/artist he is interested in novel forms of digital interaction and traditional image-making techniques.
Theo Triantafyllidis
Theo Triantafyllidis is an artist from Greece. In his work he likes exploring the fields of internet art and interactive virtual environments. He is critical of new technologies and always tries to abuse until their goofy side emerges. He likes fruits and dinosaurs.
Walter Langelaar
Walter Langelaar is an artist and subcultural activist from the Netherlands. His work in media arts and design questions our digitally networked cultures and infrastructure in varying dimensions through sculpture, installation, online performance and critical intervention.
Former Game Lab ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
Piet Zwart Institute media design (MA)
Wenrui Zhang
Wenrui is a designer interested in creating interactive experiences at the intersection of physical and digital space. Currently she is exploring user experience design and web development. She enjoys learning new technological tools, reading, and visiting aquariums.
Wilm Thoben
Wilm Thoben is a soundartist and researcher producing a dissertation about the 1960s art and technology group E.A.T. His work deals with the perception and definition of space, the abstraction of every day life and our surroundings.
Former Game Lab RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Yilip Kang
Having graduated with a Bachelors of Arts degree from UC Berkeley, Yilip pursued a Masters of Architecture degree in the department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. His academic and personal research includes 3D visual studies, robotics, and prototyping.
Former Game Lab Research Assistant
UCLA Architecture (M.Arch '11)
Zeyu Ren
Zeyu Ren is an enthusiastic artist that interested in concept design, motion graphics and illustration. He desires to understand the world by observing how light and shape interacts. He practices digital painting everyday, exploring concept that has not yet exists. Spacecraft, Machines and Mechs are his favorites. He currently studies at UCLA Design | Media Arts.
Zheng Fang
Zheng Fang was the youngest person in the world. His favorite game is making his next work.