Hello everyone! We have some sweet news to share with you really soon, but before we do we wanted to introduce you to our fantastic 2018 Programme Committee. Built up of creatives from intersecting disciplines, these lovely folks will help shape the series of talks and panels that will take place at Freeplay this year, ensuring the discussions and conversations are relevant to contemporary games culture discourse. Together with the 2018 Festival Team, we hope to bring you the most exciting and playful Freeplay yet! We’re also very excited to have an amazing array of organisations helping make this year’s Freeplay happen — Film Victoria, City of Melbourne, ACMI, Testing Grounds, and more soon to be announced.
Keep an eye out for our Call For Speakers, which will go out really soon. We’d love to see you speak at Freeplay 2018, especially if you’ve never spoken at a Freeplay before! Do consider submitting your games to the 2018 Freeplay Awards as well, submissions close 30th March. We’d love to see your personal or experimental projects, your non-digital games, student projects, and anything in between. For the first time this year, we’re accepting games from New Zealand for our Across The Ditch Award, so do submit, Kiwi dev friends! <3
Without further ado, we’re proud to introduce you to our 2018 Programme Committee:
Kalonica Quigley is a game developer and 3D artist based in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently working with Ghost Pattern as animation director for their upcoming game ‘Wayward Strand’, as well as lead 3D artist at VRTOV, an independent studio that crafts virtual reality experiences at the borderline of film and games. Her work with VRTOV includes fairytale ‘The Turning Forest’, documentary ‘Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel’, and their recent project ‘A Thin Black Line’. In 2016, Kalonica was a recipient of Film Victoria’s Women In Games Fellowship.
Amani Naseem is an artist and game maker from the Maldives living in Naarm/Melbourne. She works with people from different creative professions to make games, art, events and exhibitions. She is involved in the collectives PlayReactive and Copenhagen Game Collective, working internationally between Copenhagen and Melbourne. She is currently working on her PhD and thinking about what it means to make play in occupied and high risk environments.
Douglas Wilson is a co-owner of Die Gute Fabrik, a small games studio based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the Lead Producer on Sportsfriends, a compendium of local multiplayer games published in 2014 for PlayStation 3&4 and home computers. Douglas now lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he is an Assistant Professor (“Lecturer”) at RMIT University, teaching and researching game design.
Jini Maxwell is a current co-director of National Young Writers Festival, as well as working as a writer and illustrator. She is deeply invested in making and facilitating sincere, experimental, playful work, and in promoting community, inclusivity and accessibility in the Arts. Most recently, her work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Dumbo Feather, and Cordite Poetry Review.
Creatrix Tiara writes, produces, and performs work based around identity, liminality, and community, particularly through her experiences as a queer immigrant gender-nonconforming woman of colour. Relatively new to games, she made her entry via two games related to the experiences of immigration: Here’s Your Fuckin’ Papers, a puzzle-based parody of Papers Please, and What The @#(?@ Do They Need Now?, about the US Travel Ban. She’s very interested in the intersections of games and performance art, such as immersive experiences and escape rooms, and how they can help people understand the lives of those different than them via direct interaction and empathy.
Georgia Symons is a theatre maker, game designer and installation artist. She is interested in using playful, interactive forms to “play through” complexities. She also works extensively in youth arts, most frequently with St Martins Youth Arts and Western Edge Youth Arts. Georgia is an associate of the Agency of Coney in London, the co-director of the “Small and Loud” scratch night at Arts Centre Melbourne, and the creative director of PlayReactive Theatre. She’s currently writing a video game called Wayward Strand, due for release in 2019.
Monique Reseigh Farchione is Senior Curator, Public Programs at ACMI, Melbourne, with responsibility to lead public programming and media production, to involve diverse audiences. An experienced program manager, she has over a decade of audience engagement experience working in the cultural sector, including programming roles at the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, and Immigration Museum ǀ Museums Victoria. Recently, as Program Manager, Community Engagement at the Immigration Museum, she facilitated collaboration between the museum and a range of community groups and diverse cultural practitioners to program community-centered events and explore stories of migration and settlement in Victoria.