Team

Katie Salen, Executive Director
Katie Salen is the Executive Director of the Institute of Play, and Associate Professor in the Design and Technology program, Parsons the New School for Design. Co-author of Rules of Play, a textbook on game design, as well as The Game Design Reader (MIT Press, 2004 and 2006), she recently completed an edited volume for the MacArthur series on Digital Media and Learning called The Ecology of Games and is serving as co-editor of The International Journal of Learning and Media (MIT Press). Katie just completed a stint as lead designer on Gamestar Mechanic, a game developed by Gamelab to teach young people the play and practice of game design fundamentals. She lectures and writes extensively on game design, design education, and game culture, including authoring some of the first dispatches from the previously hidden world of machinima. www.gamersmob.com

Evonne Tsang, Director of Administration
As Director of Administration, Evonne handles everything from human resources and bookkeeping to research and event planning for the Institute of Play. She has worked in Human Resources for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Barnes & Noble College Bookstores. As a native New Yorker fortunate enough to have attended some great public schools, she is very excited about taking part in developing innovative public education experiences for others. She has a B.A. in English with a minor in Creative Writing from NYU. She has written an interactive children's book combining prose and comic book pages that is scheduled for publication in Fall 2009. She is an avid practitioner of Google-fu and thinks wearing jeans to work is pretty keen.

Chloe Varelidi, Design Intern
Chloe is an architect but has also been a devoted gamer since she was a child. Her career in play started with prestigious street games such as Capture The Flag, a game she used to play in her neighborhood in Athens, Greece . Since then, Chloe has been involved in one way or another in various projects connected to game design. In collaboration with Hybrid Space Lab in Amsterdam , she worked in the design of Subcity, an urban game for the city of Essen in Germany , and the interactive installation Beyond You-topia for the 2005 International Biennale, in Florence . Her work Playtime has been exhibited in the 5th Pan-Hellenic Architectural Exhibition and the New Trends in Architecture in Eastern Europe and Asia Pacific, Greece 2005. In 2006, Chloe moved to New York as an MFA candidate in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design.

Albert Dang, Design Intern
Albert is a game designer and multimedia developer who has done work in distance-based learning, educational simulations, lesson planners, games, and installations. As a Senior Developer at Six Red Marbles, LLC, he helped develop award-winning science simulations for Houghton Mifflin's Education Place and collaborated with Pearson Scott Foresman and TERC to create LogoPaths. Currently a graduate student in the Design and Technology program at Parsons The New School for Design, he views the Institute of Play as the perfect opportunity to apply his interest in gaming and technology to different pedagogies in an actual school setting. His game design research has been presented at the 2007 DiGRA Conference and his installation work has been shown in New York and Beijing. In 2007 he received a Game Developers Conference Scholarship from the IGDA.

Radhika Tandon
Radhika hails from the city of Mumbai, India. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree and is a graduate of the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons, The New School for Design. Her past work experience includes design and development of interactive online media. In 2006, her thesis game ‘Panchatantra’, aimed at educating kids in a fun way, was exhibited at the Games 4 Change Annual Conference Expo. She has also collaborated with other designers in creating fun games such as ‘Fowl Frenzy’, which won an award for Best Visual Design at Mobile Game Mosh: a 24-hour Game Design Jam. Her interests in the areas of games, learning and kids has led her to work on a variety of projects at Scholastic, Global Kids and Institute of Play.

Board of Directors
Carole Artigiani, Global Kids
Peter Lee, Gamelab
Franklin Madison, ITAC
Jay Melican, Intel
Sophie Rogers-Gessert, Demos
Katie Salen, Institute of Play
Eric Zimmerman, Gamelab

Advisors
John Seely Brown
Alex Chisholm, NBC
James Paul Gee, Arizona State University
Mizuko Ito, Annenberg Center for Communication, USC
Robert Hughes, President New Visions for Public Schools
Michael Levine, Joan Ganz Center
Jane McGonigal, Institute for the Future
Nichole Pinkard, University of Chicago's Center for Urban School Improvement
Amit Pitaru, NYU Intertelecommunications Program
Bob Stein, Institute for the Future of the Book
Douglas Rushkoff, writer
Randy Swearer, designer
Robert Torres, Design by Design
Loretta Wolozin, Parsons the New School for Design
Connie Yowell, MacArthur Foundation