About

Hello! I’m Christy Dena!

 

Christy Dena (she/they, pronunciation Dee-na) is a storyteller, educator, and researcher who nurtures a more kind, just, and creative world.

Christy is a writer-designer-director of multi-artform and interactive projects. She has worked on installations, Apps, live games, tabletop, ARGs, VR, films, theatre, and TV shows. Her original interactive fiction projects have won and been nominated for AWGIEs and WA Premier’s Prize, among other awards, and her work has been exhibited at the Experimenta’s New Media Arts Biennial, Contours, Parallels (Freeplay), Babycastles, PopUp Playground @ ACMI, CHIPlay, QUT’s Science & Technology Centre and more. Christy has worked with clients such as NoMimes/Cisco, Nokia, ABC, Bangarra Dance Company, Guildhouse, Cementa, Australia Council for the Arts, Wieden+Kennedy, and more.

Christy has spoken at events around the world, including Transmedia Hollywood (LA), Power to the Pixel, London Film Festival (London), International Women in Digital Media Summit (CAN), Game Developers Conference (San Francisco), Whistler Film Festival (British Columbia), and more. Christy has been a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Emmys), AWG, ADG, and a board member of Carnegie Mellon’s ETC Press. Christy has mentored at labs such as Power to the Pixel (London Film Festival), Screen Australia’s Indigenous Cross-Over Lab, ABC Laboratory of Advanced Media Production, and designs and runs international and interdisciplinary labs, including Forward/Story, Crafting Intangibles, Telematic Studio, Transmedia Victoria, and the Extended Experiences Lab.

Christy has written for Cordite Literary Review, The Conversation, Meanland, RealTime, ABC, Writing Queensland Magazine, Queensland Writers Centre Connect, among other publications. She has written non-fiction chapters for books such as The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies (2018, Routledge); Copyfight (2015, New South Publishing); The Emerging Writer (2012, Emerging Writers’ Festival); New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality (2009, Routledge); Space Time Play (2007, Birkhauser). Christy has been interviewed in books such as A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling (2012, McGraw-Hill), and contributed short pieces for books such as Cross-Media Communications (2010, ETC Press).

Christy has written reviews for publications such as RealTime, Electronic Book Review, ABC New Media, Australian Book Review (ABR), Cyberculture Studies, and Second Life Arts & Total Entertainment Magazine.

Christy holds a Bachelor of Arts (Visual & Performing Arts, Monash Uni), Post-Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing (Uni of Melb), and a PhD in Media, Narrative & Game Studies (Uni of Syd). Christy is currently part-time Professor of Cross-Media and Interactive Narratives at the Norwegian Film School; developing and freelancing on interactive projects, developing public-facing education work, and writing a book on redesigning narrative design. Christy creates on/with unceded Bunurong Country of the Kulin Nation.

Christy at a table with a lot of index cards
Older photo of Christy in Costa Rica, with a flowery dress on, hair back in a ponytail, sitting on a green couch looking over index cards, designing the events for her co-run lab Forward/Story.

 

A summary CV.

Email christy at this domain.

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[Note: I do not do sponsored posts.]