The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) houses seven academic divisions: Film & Television Production; Cinema & Media Studies; John C. Hench Division of Animation + Digital Arts; John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television; Interactive Media & Games; Media Arts + Practice; Peter Stark Producing Program.
The University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts's Interactive Media & Games Division first accepted M.F.A. students in 2002. The division currently offers both undergraduate (B.A.) and graduate (M.F.A.) programs in interactive media and game design. The programs include courses in game design, development, audio, animation, and user research as well as experimental work in gestural and immersive interfaces, transmedia design, and interactive cinema.
Michael Naimark is an artist, inventor, and scholar in the fields of virtual reality and new media art. He is best known for his work in projection mapping, virtual travel, live global video, and cultural preservation, and often refers to this body of work as “place representation”.
Lillian F. Schwartz is an American artist considered a pioneer of computer-mediated art and one of the first artists notable for basing almost her entire oeuvre on computational media. Many of her ground-breaking projects were done in the 1960s and 1970s, well before the desktop computer revolution made computer hardware and software widely available to artists.
Mariano "Mar" Elepaño is a Filipino American independent filmmaker, teacher, and has been the production supervisor of the John C. Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts, USC School of Cinematic Arts since 1993.
Kurt Ralske is an American visual artist and musician. He is the former singer and guitarist in alternative rock band Ultra Vivid Scene.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are a Brooklyn, New York-based married couple who make art together, and still continue to make projects together. They work with interactive media, film, performance and installation to explore personal experience in relation with new technology, the mass media, and global commerce with work that is highly influenced through the perspective of Lev Manovich. They often re-examine classic genres and works of cinema, science fiction or television narrative, creating sculptural objects, net art, robotic movies or live performance They have projects that are collection of subcategories. In 2002 they received the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Emerging Fields. They were awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2014, Kevin collaborated with Anil Dash to co-create Monegraph, short for “monetized graphics” The work "Quantum", was included in Sotheby's "Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale" in June 2021.
Tracy Fullerton is an American game designer, educator and writer. She is a Professor in the USC Interactive Media & Games Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Game Innovation Lab at USC. In 2014 she was named Director of the USC Games Program, an interdisciplinary collaboration between the School of Cinematic Arts and the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC. From 2010 to 2017, she served as Chair of the USC Interactive Media & Games Division.
Anne Friedberg was chair of the Critical Studies Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and President-elect of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. An author, historian and theorist of modern media culture, Friedberg received her PhD in cinema studies from NYU. She was on the faculty of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, where she was the principal architect for a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Visual Studies and the founding director and programmer of UCI's Film and Video Center.
Kathy Smith is an Australian independent animator, painter, new media artist, and Professor with the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Smith chaired the John C. Hench Division of Animation & Digital Arts from 2004 - 2009 & 2010 - 2014.
L. Franklin Gilliam is an American filmmaker and media artist who deals with issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation in their work. Gilliam was the director of projects and community catalyst at gamelab's Institute of Play and a visiting faculty member at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. They are currently vice president of strategy and innovation at Girls Who Code.
Christiane Paul is chief curator/director of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons School of Design and an associate professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. She is widely known as the author of the book Digital Art, part of the 'World of Art' series published by Thames & Hudson.
Created in 2013, Media Arts and Practice (MA+P) is the seventh degree-granting division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Micha Cárdenas, stylized as micha cárdenas, is an American visual and performance artist who is an assistant professor of art and design, specializing in game studies and playable media, at the University of California Santa Cruz. Cárdenas is an artist and theorist who works with the algorithms and poetics of trans people of color in digital media.
Tom Sito is an American animator, animation historian and teacher. He is currently a Professor at USC's School of Cinematic Arts in the Animation Division. In 1998, Sito was included by Animation Magazine in their list of the One Hundred Most Important People in Animation.
James C. Pomeroy was an American artist whose practice spanned a variety of media including performance art, sound art, photography, installation art, sculpture, and video art.
Paul Sermon was born 23 March 1966, in Oxford, England. Since September 2013 he has worked as Professor of Visual Communication in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Brighton.
Nancy Burson is an American artist known for creating photographs using computer morphing technology, including the Age Machine, Human Race Machine and Anomaly Machine.
Nina Sobell is a contemporary sculptor, videographer, and performance artist. She began creating web-based artworks in the early 1990s.
Sondra Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, computer-based media, installation, and performance. Perry's work investigates "blackness, black femininity, African American heritage" and the portrayal or representation of black people throughout history, focusing on how blackness influences technology and image making. Perry explores the duality of intelligence and seductiveness in the contexts of black family heritage, black history, and black femininity. "Perry is committed to net neutrality and ideas of collective production and action, using open source software to edit her work and leasing it digitally for use in galleries and classrooms, while also making all her videos available for free online. This principle of open access in Perry's practice aims to privilege black life, to democratize access to art and culture, and to offer a critical platform that differentiates itself from the portrayal of blackness in the media". For Perry, blackness is a technology which creates fissures in systems of surveillance and control and thus creates inefficiency as an opportunity for resistance.
