Stephen Butchko earned a BA in theatre from Western Washington University. After relocating to Los Angeles, he produced and performed in independent stage and film projects with his wife, Deirdre Lyons. In 2020, he co-founded Ferryman Collective, creating scripted theatre in virtual reality, contributing as director, producer, writer, and actor.

Edmond Y. Chang is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio University. His areas of interest include technoculture, queer game studies, ethnic futurisms, popular culture, and 20/21C American Literature. He co-authored Video Games, Literature, and Close Playing with Timothy Welsh, and co-edited Roll With Advantage: Creative, Collaborative, and Critical Responses to Dungeons & Dragons with Suzanne Richardson. He is the creator of Tellings, a TTRPG, and Archaea, a padded-weapon LARP. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Analog Game Studies.

Heidi Coleman is a director, dramaturg, and game designer, and currently a Senior Instructional Professor for Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago.  She locates herself at the intersection of games and performance and serves as a co-director of The Fourcast Lab, a transmedia design collective, which creates Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), pervasive games, cross-platform stories, and networked performances.

Jonaya Kemper is an award-winning game designer, academic, and educator. Currently the Assistant Teaching Professor of Playable and Participatory Media at UC Santa Cruz, her theory of emancipatory bleed asks players to utilize roleplay as a stage for personal and community liberation.

Sam is an award winning designer of narrative games, including Forsooth! (Game Chef Winner) and Room at the Top (IndieCade Official Selection). He is also Co-founder of Extra Ludic, a consultancy that develops impactful games for organizations at the highest levels of government and civil society. He studied writing and theater at Emerson College and currently teaches game design at Northeastern University.

Deirdre V. Lyons is a Los Angeles producer, director, and performer, and a co-founder of Ferryman Collective, creating award-winning live theatre in virtual reality. She is a producer, assistant director, and performer on Uncanny Alley: A New Day, and directed the SXSW Audience Award winning VR production Gumball Dreams.

Nick O’Leary is a New York based director of theater and live events. Born and raised in New England, he has developed new work with The American Repertory Theater (MA), Guerilla Opera (MA), Actors Theatre of Louisville (KY), The Flea Theater (NY), The Museum of the Moving Image (NY), Exquisite Corpse Company (NY), The 24 Hour Plays (NY), Dacha Theatre (WA), Sinking Ship Creations (NY), as a guest artist at Dartmouth College (NH), and more. Nick is also a designer and creator of games and interactive experiences. His work with Tiltfactor Laboratory has focused on developing games and live interactive experiences designed to effect social change, combat gender bias, and facilitate the sourcing and organization of archival images for public institutions.

Nicole Orabona is the co-founder of cirqueSaw. With their partner Nathan Leigh, they produce remote work at the intersection of live performance and games. Their award-winning interactive pieces include labRats (NarraScope 2025 Featured Showcase, IndieCade 2026 Winner, GDC ExGS 2026) Void Main and POV: You Are An AI Achieving Consciousness.

SYMPOSIUM CO-CHAIR

Celia Pearce is an award-winning game designer, artist, curator, author, teacher, and serial instigator. She is a full Professor at Northeastern University, and is co-founder and Festival Chair of IndieCade. Her games have been featured at Come Out & Play, Different Games, Incubate, Smithsonian Indie Arcade, and BostonFIG, where here game eBee received the award for most Innovative Tabletop Game. Her publications include Communities of Play (MIT) and Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader (ETC/CMU Press). Her current research and creative practice builds on her pre-academia career as an experience designer for theme parks and is focused on the intersection between game design, live action roleplaying and theatre.

Braden Roy is an award-winning narrative designer, writer, producer, game designer, director, developer, speaker, performer, visual artist, technical advisor, PGA member, and general doer-and-lister-of-things. In 2020 he co-founded both Ferryman Collective and XR LIVE, a company and a community—respectively—each independently dedicated to the creation and celebration of playable/immersive theatre in XR. In 2023 he founded the XR LIVE Performance Exhibition, an international online festival as an extension and elevation of the aforementioned XR LIVE community. His work includes projects such as PARA, Krampusnacht, Welcome to Respite, En Route, Gumball Dreams, Murder Ballads, Ghosts in the Machine, Find WiiLii, Spaceholder, and most iterations of OnBoardXR—as well as several unannounced projects still in the works. He has a tendency to be overly verbose when providing summarized biographical descriptions of himself.

SYMPOSIUM CO-CHAIR

Evan Torner defended his dissertation on race representation in East German genre cinema at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2013, and spent 2013-2014 at Grinnell College as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. He has published several articles pertaining to East Germany, critical race theory, DEFA Indianerfilme, science-fiction, transnational genre cinema, and game studies, as well as co-edited several books. His volume Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Role-Playing and Participatory Media co-edited with William J. White was published with McFarland Publishing in 2012, and he is one of the founding editors of the Analog Game Studies journal (http://analoggamestudies.org). His major projects underway include the Handbook of East German Cinema: The DEFA Legacy, co-edited with Henning Wrage and under contract with Walter De Gruyter, and a monograph entitled A Century and Beyond: Critical Readings of German Science-Fiction Cinema.

SYMPOSIUM COORDINATOR

Serena Yang is a master’s student in Game Science and Design at Northeastern University and a multidisciplinary designer-researcher studying cognitive sandbox games for adult learning. Her work integrates psychology, interactive media, and AI to explore identity, relationships, and metacognition through playful, reflective systems in tabletop and digital formats for players.