Phoenix Perry

Biography

Phoenix Perry creates embodied games and installations. Her work brings people together to explore their impact on each other. By detecting touch between people, encourage group play, and designing open-ended multi-user environments, she hopes to foster prosocial behavior. An advocate for women in games and creative coding, she founded Code Liberation Foundation. This organization teaches women to program computational creative work for free. Since starting in 2012, this project has reached over 3000 women in the US and UK. Fostering professional growth through mentoring new leaders in the field, she empowers new voices. Presently, she leads an MSc in Creative Computing at the University of the Arts London's Creative Coding Institute.

Her past roles include Program Leader of the Independent Games and Playable Experience MA at Goldsmiths, University of London, Sr. Lecturer at HKU in the Netherlands, and an Adjunct Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, NYU Game Center and NYU ITP. She founded the game studio Dozen Eyes Games focused on games and installations which created social change. The highlight of this project was the creation of a game with the US State Department to help newly arrived refugees in the US. Concurrently, she owned and ran Devotion Gallery in Williamsburg Brooklyn from 2009-2014, which was a vital cultural establishment producing over 200 classes, exhibitions, and events. She is currently doing a PhD at Goldsmiths University of London and has an MS from NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Her speaking engagements include A MAZE, GDC, Games for Change, The Open Hardware Summit, Indiecade, Comic Con, Internet Week, Create Tech, IBM Dev Pulse, Montreal International Games Summit and NYU Game Center among others. Perry's creative work spans a large range of disciplines including drawing, generative art, video, games, interfaces, and sound. Her projects have been seen worldwide at venues and festivals including the GDC, E3, Come out and Play, Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science, Lincoln Center, Transmediale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, LAMCA, Harvest Works, Babycastles, European Media Arts Festival, GenArt, Seoul Film Festival, and Harvestworks. In 2011 she co-authored the book, Meet the Kinect with Sean Kean and Johnathan Hall. Finally, she has curated since 1996 in a range of cultural venues, the most recent of which is her gallery, Devotion Gallery until 2014. Devotion was a Williamsburg gallery focused on the intersection of art, science, new media, and design.