Christy Dena

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Christy Dena
CitizenshipAustralia
Website https://www.christydena.com

Christy Dena is an Australian writer, game designer, and scholar. Her scholarship and design practice in transmedia storytelling has been widely cited, [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] especially for promoting the term "cross-media storytelling". She is also known for defining the term "transmedial fictions" for The Johns Hopkins Encyclopedia of Digital Textuality. [10] She created her own studio, Universe Creation 101, [11] where she creates original projects and does consultations and freelance work. She likes to combine live social experiences with online technology, traditional forms of screen (film and games) and paper-based objects (tabletop and books). [12]

Contents

Life, education, and career

Dena completed her PhD in media, Narrative, and Game Studies [13] at the University of Sydney in 2009. [14] Her dissertation on transmedia, Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments "put her on the [transmedia] map." [15]

Dena was the first Digital Writer in Residence for the Australia Council for the Arts and the Queensland University of Technology at The Cube, [16] where she created the large installation "Robot. [17] She currently serves as the Program Co-ordinator of the Master of Creative Industries at the SAE Creative Media Institute, Brisbane. [10] She has worked on games for Cisco and Nokia, and is a member of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Emmys). [10]

She has served as a mentor; is supervising Artistic Fellows at the CEFIMA, Norwegian Film School; and is teaching at Griffith University. [18] Dena works closely with unceded Boonwrrung Country. [18] In 2010, she presented a TedXTransmedia talk on Dare to Design. [19] In 2012, she was the Digital Writing Ambassador for the Emerging Writers Festival. [20] She has also exhibited her work, such as Recharge at the 6th International Biennial of Media Art. [17]

Selected works and publications

Alternative Reality Games

Dena has worked on alternate reality games.

Nokia's Conspiracy for Good, Cisco's The Hunt, and the Australian Broadcasting Company's Bluebird AR. [23] [24] She has also created touch-screen installations for The Cube (Robot University) [17] at Queensland University of Technology [24] and at the Experimenta Biennial of Media Art.

AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS (2013) was a crowd-funded project inspired after the passing of her mother, which led to her contemplating her own mortality. [16] [25] [26] This is a radio drama (termed a "web audio adventure) [27] with a large voice cast and an in-game browser. The protagonist attempts to discover the meaning of death within an overworld and an underworld. [25] It is termed a comedic work "Despite help from her part-time Time Traveling Assistant, she finds her investigation upsets fellow Gambling Philosophers, Ticket Inspectors, Artist Assassins and the Quantum Theorist Crime Boss. Ultimately, her inability to fit in makes everyone involved…really annoyed." [28] The work is both game and digital storytelling. [29]

Awards

Dena has won interactive writing awards from the Australian Writers' Guild award for Interactive Media and WA Premier's Book Award for Digital Narrative for (AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS). [17] [18] This work was also a finalist for the Best Writing in a Game Award at the 2012 Freeplay Independent Gaming Festival [20] and was shown at the 2014 Media Arts Show for the Electronic Literature Organization. [17]

References

  1. Hutcheon, Linda (2012). A theory of adaptation. Siobhan O'Flynn (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. ISBN   978-0-203-09501-0. OCLC   810082495.
  2. Thon, Jan-Noël. (2015). Transmedial narratology and contemporary media culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN   978-0-8032-8837-9. OCLC   951885050.
  3. Paavilainen, Janne; Korhonen, Hannu; Alha, Kati; Stenros, Jaakko; Koskinen, Elina; Mayra, Frans (2017). "The Pokémon GO Experience: A Location-Based Augmented Reality Mobile Game Goes Mainstream". Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 2493–2498. doi:10.1145/3025453.3025871. ISBN   978-1-4503-4655-9.
  4. Kalogeras, Stavroula (25 June 2014). Transmedia Storytelling and the New Era of Media Convergence in Higher Education. Springer. ISBN   978-1-137-38837-7.
  5. Hassler-Forest, Dan (21 July 2016). Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN   978-1-78348-494-2.
  6. Atkinson, Sarah (10 April 2014). Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN   978-1-62356-637-1.
  7. Pence, Harry E. (1 December 2011). "Teaching with Transmedia" . Journal of Educational Technology Systems. 40 (2): 131–140. doi:10.2190/ET.40.2.d. ISSN   0047-2395.
  8. Bourdaa, Mélanie (2013). "'Following the Pattern': The Creation of an Encyclopaedic Universe with Transmedia Storytelling" . Adaptation. 6 (2): 202–214. doi:10.1093/adaptation/apt009.
  9. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. "Christy Dena: "Estamos creando historias completas integradas, combinando muchas plataformas diferentes"". comein.uoc.edu (in Spanish). Retrieved 15 June 2025.
  10. 1 2 3 King, Brad. "Christy Dena". ETC Press. Retrieved 6 May 2021.
  11. "Celebrating Women in E-Lit". Electronic Literature Lab. Retrieved 25 February 2024.
  12. "Christy Dena's Field Notes From Earth" . Retrieved 5 May 2021.
  13. "Christy Dena's Field Notes From Earth" . Retrieved 15 June 2025.
  14. Trento, Francisco. "The Experience of Story Worlds Across Media: A Conversation with Aaron Smith". Revista Geminis. 2: 276–284.
  15. "How Sound Can "Unify" Transmedia: Christy Dena on AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS — Pop Junctions". Henry Jenkins. 26 February 2013. Retrieved 15 June 2025.
  16. 1 2 Hancox, Donna (2013). "We are our stories: Australian reading experiences in 2013". The Conversation.
  17. 1 2 3 4 5 "Christy Dena". Experimenta. Retrieved 25 February 2024.
  18. 1 2 3 "Christy Dena". AIDC. Retrieved 6 May 2021.
  19. TEDxTransmedia - Christy Dena - DAREtoDESIGN, 18 October 2010, retrieved 25 February 2024
  20. 1 2 "Christy Dena". Cordite Poetry Review. Retrieved 15 June 2025.
  21. "[META] The Designer-Academic Problem". Electronic Book Review. 17 June 2008.
  22. Dena, Christy (23 October 2018). "DIYSPY - Live Remote Play at CHI Play'18". Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts . ACM. pp. 109–115. doi:10.1145/3270316.3270590. ISBN   978-1-4503-5968-9.
  23. McGowan, Lee (2013). "Bias in full effect". Queensland University of Technology.
  24. 1 2 "Christy Dena | ETC Press - Carnegie Mellon University". press.etc.cmu.edu. Retrieved 25 February 2024.
  25. 1 2 "Authentic In All Caps: A conversation with Christy Dena". The Sydney Morning Herald. 27 February 2013. Retrieved 15 June 2025.
  26. Hancox, Donna (19 December 2013). "We are our stories: Australian reading experiences in 2013". The Conversation. Retrieved 15 June 2025.
  27. "AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS: A web audio adventure | remotedevice.net" . Retrieved 15 June 2025.
  28. "AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS – Universe Creation 101" . Retrieved 15 June 2025.
  29. Technology (QUT), Queensland University of. "Radio plus App equals cutting-edge storytelling". QUT. Retrieved 15 June 2025.