About

“She’s brilliant.”
Ted Hope, Producer, Adventureland, 21 Grams

Christy Dena specializes in the design and execution of trans/cross-media projects. As Director of Universe Creation 101, she consults on the design of projects, now produces as well, and is developing her own creative projects and web services.  Her clients include Nokia, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Wieden + Kennedy, Australia Council for the Arts, Australian Film Festival, Australian Film, Television and Radio School.

Christy has given keynotes at Power to the Pixel, London Film Festival and the First International Conference on Cross-Media Interaction Design in Sweden.

She has been featured in ABC’s 7.30 Tonight, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, The Sacramento Bee, Vancouver Sun, Filmmaker Magazine, Australian Financial Review, The Age, Herald Sun, Encore, and others.

She co-wrote the Australian Literature Board’s Writers’ Guide to Making a Digital Living. Christy has published chapters or been quoted in numerous books, including Cross-Media Communications: an Introduction to the Art of Creating Integrated Media Experiences; Pervasive Games: Theory and Design; Think Outside the Box Office: The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution and Marketing in the Digital Era; Space, Time Play; New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality.

Christy is a skilled educator who is an in demand speaker and mentor. She has given presentations on the design of cross-media projects to companies and organisations worldwide such as Nokia Finland; Microsoft Research; O’Reilly Media; Australia Council for the Arts; AIMIA; Film Australia; Australian Film, Television and Radio School; Australian Broadcasting Corporation and many more. She has spoken at numerous industry festivals and events worldwide, including Whistler Film Festival; Cartoons on the Bay; Power to the Pixel (London Film Festival); Slamdance; Documentary Organisation of Canada’s Reboot; DIYDays; Destination Film Festival; Revelations Film Festival and Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment.

Her mentoring clients include the UK-based cross-media lab for filmmakers Pixel Lab; the UK-based but global Crossover Lab, the Australian Literature Board’s Story of the Future initiative; Laboratory of Advanced Media Production – a 5 day cross-media residential for the Australia Film, Television and Radio School; and others.

She has taught the design and theory of digital games, pervasive games, alternate reality games, cross-media, hypertext fiction, blog fiction, bot fiction, mobile fiction to institutions in UK, The Netherlands and across Australia.

Christy has advised organisations in her roles on the Board of dLux Media Arts (an Australian new media arts organisation); Freeplay Advisory Committee; Editorial Board of Second Nature: International Journal of Creative Media; and Conference Management Committee for the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment.

She recently submitted her PhD on transmedia practice at the School of Letters, Art and Media, University of Sydney. She has a Postgraduate Diploma in Creative Writing  from the School of Creative Arts University of Melbourne; and Bachelor of Arts (Visual and Performing Arts) from Monash University.

She was nominated as the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award; awarded a Director’s Secondment at the Playbox Theatre Company; awarded 2^nd Prize (Prose) in the Melbourne University Creative Writing Competition; and was nominated for the Caltex Best All-Round Year 12 Student Award.

She began her creative career in theatre, working as a writer, producer, performer and director. She then pursued her passion for animation and became a producer in Australia’s first ever fully-digital production studio. For years she produced digital effects for television commercials and TV shows, as well as CD-Roms and websites. As an actor, she has appearances in TV commercials,  TV shows, short films, performed comedy at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for years, toured Australia for a comedy cabaret, and had her own segment in a television show. More recently she has been pursuing her passion for cross-media.

Now, as the Director of Universe Creation 101, Christy continues to consult to clients, but now also executes projects with her network of international practitioners, and is developing her own entertainment web services and creative projects.

For more info about Christy, see Nikki Nimme’s interview with me for Power to the Pixel, London Film Festival. Other thoughts, quotes and interviews are in the Press Page.

What’s My Passion? Basically, I’m passionate about anything to do with cross-media entertainment…transmedia storytelling, distributed narrative, cross-sited narrative, cross-media communication, convergent storytelling, multi-platform storytelling, 360 content, integrated marketing, neo-baroque aesthetics, multivariant narrative, networked narrative environments, cross-media, X-media, XME, inter-media world franchises, mixed reality gaming, augmented reality, alternate reality games …whatever you want to call it.