Christy Dena
Christy Dena is an Australian writer, game designer, and scholar. Her scholarship and design practice in transmedia storytelling has been widely cited, especially for promoting the term "cross-media storytelling". She is also known for defining the term "transmedial fictions" for The Johns Hopkins Encyclopedia of Digital Textuality. She created her own studio, Universe Creation 101, where she creates original projects and does consultations and freelance work. She likes to combine live social experiences with online technology, traditional forms of screen and paper-based objects.
Life, education, and career
Dena completed her PhD in media, Narrative, and Game Studies at the University of Sydney in 2009. Her dissertation on transmedia, Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments "put her on the map."Dena was the first Digital Writer in Residence for the Australia Council for the Arts and the Queensland University of Technology at The Cube, where she created the large installation "Robot.She currently serves as the Program Co-ordinator of the Master of Creative Industries at the SAE Creative Media Institute, Brisbane. She has worked on games for Cisco and Nokia, and is a member of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
She has served as a mentor; is supervising Artistic Fellows at the CEFIMA, Norwegian Film School; and is teaching at Griffith University. Dena works closely with unceded Boonwrrung Country. In 2010, she presented a TedXTransmedia talk on Dare to Design. In 2012, she was the Digital Writing Ambassador for the Emerging Writers Festival. She has also exhibited her work, such as Recharge at the 6th International Biennial of Media Art.
Selected works and publications
- Dena, C " The Designer-Academic Problem" considers the relationships between game design and academic work.
- Dena, Christy "DIYSPY - Live Remote Play at Computer Human Interaction Play'18" was a Live game experience using zoom and an app.
Alternative Reality Games
Dena has worked on alternate reality games.Nokia's Conspiracy for Good, Cisco's The Hunt, and the Australian Broadcasting Company's Bluebird AR. She has also created touch-screen installations for The Cube at Queensland University of Technology and at the Experimenta Biennial of Media Art.
AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS was a crowd-funded project inspired after the passing of her mother, which led to her contemplating her own mortality. This is a radio drama with a large voice cast and an in-game browser. The protagonist attempts to discover the meaning of death within an overworld and an underworld. It is termed a comedic work "Despite help from her part-time Time Traveling Assistant, she finds her investigation upsets fellow Gambling Philosophers, Ticket Inspectors, Artist Assassins and the Quantum Theorist Crime Boss. Ultimately, her inability to fit in makes everyone involved…really annoyed." The work is both game and digital storytelling.