Dr. Theresa (Tess) Jean Tanenbaum (she/her/hers), game designer, composer, consultant, speaker, and scholar will present a public lecture and workshop for students in the Creative Technologies program as part of the David Brian Williams Creative Technologies Visiting Artist series.
Tanenbaum’s public lecture “Restorying Game Studies: Playing with memory, fiction, and magic as sites for transformative identity work” will be held on Thursday, November 9, at 3:30 p.m. at University Galleries, 11 Uptown Circle, Normal. The lecture is free and open to the public.
As part of her artist residency, Tanenbaum will also lead a student workshop titled “Magick is Real: Play as Resistance and Ritual” on Friday, November 10, at 10 a.m. at the Center for the Visual Arts room 50.
Tanenbaum is a songwriter, performer, game designer, artist, activist, and practicing witch. She recently left a tenured position as an associate professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where she was a founding member of the Transformative Play Lab. She studied music and mythology at the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, where she earned her bachelor of arts degree. She completed her master’s degree and Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Tanenbaum’s work is playful, provocative, interdisciplinary, and frequently straddles the line between art, design, research, and activism. In her work, she seeks to create possibilities for social and individual change, using participatory narrative to highlight how the identities that we inhabit in the world are contingent and negotiated.
These experiences of transformative play create possibility models that are emancipatory, allowing oppressed and marginalized people to inhabit new identities that create possibilities where there were none before and reclaim power and agency denied to them. Recently she has incorporated her magical practice into her scholarship and activism, teaching a graduate seminar on Identity, Magic, and Social Change Through Play, and speaking at venues throughout the United States and Europe.
Tanenbaum is the first of three guest artists sponsored by the David Brian Williams Visiting Artist program who will visit campus this academic year.
For more information or to arrange an accommodation to participate in this event, contact Kristin Carlson at kacarl1@IllinoisState.edu. Please allow sufficient time to arrange the accommodation.
