TreaAndrea M. Russworm

Samantha Blackmon

TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Ph.D. is the Microsoft Endowed Chair and a Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California. She is also the founder of Radical Play (a games-based public humanities initiative and afterschool program), and she has been a professor and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UMass Amherst. A prolific author and editor, Russworm is a Series Editor of Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press). She is the author or editor of three books: Blackness is Burning; Gaming Representation; and Theorizing Tyler Perry. With research expertise in digital culture, video games, and popular African American media, Professor Russworm’s scholarship and interviews have also been shared on CNN, The History Channel, Turner Classic Movies, in podcasts, and on streaming platforms like Twitch. She is a video game Hall of Fame voter, and she is currently writing a new monograph on The Sims and a book on race and the politics of play.

Samantha Blackmon is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition. Her research focuses on games as cultural critique and the intersections of race, gender, and technology in and around the games industry. She is a DEI speaker and consultant who has worked with developers and platforms of all sizes. She is also a content creator as well as an anti-academic who has been featured in publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Verge as well as numerous podcasts and talk shows. Her work can be found in Feminist Media Histories, Computer Games and Technical Communication, CCC, Computers and Composition, JAC, and CEA Critic. She is the co-founder and host of the award-winning feminist game studies blog and podcast Not Your Mama’s Gamer, a five time winner of Microsoft’s MVP Award, and the winner of the SIGDOC Rigo Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to the field of communication design in game design.