Ashley spends her days creating technical demos to empower Unity creators with the skills they need to make amazing games. You’ll often find her at developer events digging deep into new Unity features and getting excited about the community’s latest creations. Her past roles at Global Game Jam, IndieCade, and Games For Change have made her a passionate advocate of democratizing game development – a mission she proudly continues at Unity.

Since his youth, Karim has dreamt of disrupting the gaming industry through VR simulation. Today, Robocom is the largest game development studio in the Arab world, with over 50 developers and artists. The studio has worked with Discovery Channel and Hasbro’s Transformers franchise. With a focus on community building, Robocom is currently developing the first cross-platform open-world VR zone, Pixel, in Abu Dhabi’s Al Qana entertainment district, including an e-sports academy, gaming diner, and dedicated event space for gaming. Karim’s achievements include Hasbro’s Game Changers Award, BBAA Game Changers Award, Forbes 30 under 30 (class of 2020), and cover of Business Arabia.

Andy Touch is a Content Evangelist for Unity Technologies; focusing on creating example projects to demonstrate upcoming features and to teach the Unity Community on how they can take their games to the next level.

Chema is a longtime gamer who’s thrilled to have realized her dream of working in the video game industry. Armed with a computer science degree, she’s held numerous roles on games for different platforms, and she started in game design over seven years ago. Drawing on her passion for games, teaching experience and dev chops, today Chema is a Unity evangelist based in Copenhagen, educating users and sharing her passion for Unity.

Ciro leads the EMEA evangelist team at Unity. He and his team travel throughout the EMEA region to spread the word about Unity, focusing on games. He likes to draw advanced development practices and optimisation tricks into his talks, occasionally touching on game design, too.

Amel is a Unity technical advocate based in Copenhagen. She joined Unity after graduating from the IMAC Engineering School in Paris, where she studied multimedia engineering. She enjoys projects that involve both art and technology.

With 20 years of experience in VFX, CG feature, and TV animation, Ben has worked for a variety of top studios, including Dreamworks Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Disney Feature Animation, MPC, and Industrial Light and Magic, and he’s worked as a digital artist supervisor on major franchises including Avengers and Transformers. In his role at Unity, Ben works with technical decision-makers and influencers at key studios to advance the art and science of visual effects and animation through the use of real-time technology.

Kowloon Nights is a global fund dedicated to independent developers. We are a group driven by passion and our years of experience working closely with game developers.
We provide project-based funding to talented teams whether they are working on their first game or well established.

Even before Arturo finished his computer science degree, he’d been prototyping and developing games for console and mobile for years. Arturo is passionate about computer graphics, game-feel and programming, and a diehard fan of horror in any format. As a Unity developer advocate, Arturo loves it when users ask him questions he doesn’t know the answer to, so everyone gets to learn from real-life scenarios together. Arturo’s work focuses on Unity’s operate, monetize, and engagement solutions

The youngest of four siblings took an early liking to gaming along with his brother. Never missing a big release and taking a liking to some of the biggest FPS games at a young age, he built his competitive edge for gaming early on. When it came time to begin a career, he took a lot of interest in the new wave of indie gaming. He decided to take a shot at starting his own. Collaborating with his older brother, they decided to teach each other how to make games after college by working on Swimsanity. Using his experience working full time in corporate at a software solutions company, years of development, and studying the gaming industry would be the beginning step to creating Decoy Games alongside his brother.

Matt has 15 years of experience in the video games industry working for companies such as THQ, Bioware, and Bethesda. He has worked on amazing games like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Fallout 76, with a focus on monetization design. His current mission is to empower design teams with Unity’s tools and solutions.

Sultan joined twofour54 as part of the Strategy & Investments team, before transitioning to Gaming & eSports Operations. His goal is to turn Abu Dhabi into a global powerhouse competitive with Montreal and Singapore on the gaming and e-sports scene by building the best-in-class foundation game developers and e-sports organizers need to succeed. Sultan spends his free time playing the latest releases on both PC and console, while also enthusiastically cheering on his favorite e-sports teams.

Yannick Theler is an Ubisoft veteran, with experience covering all facets of the company, from business development to operations and production. After working in the group’s Swiss business office and later in Shanghai, Yannick took on the challenge of creating the Abu Dhabi studio. Now with 60+ employees from over 20 countries, Ubisoft Abu Dhabi boasts acclaimed games such as CSI Hidden Crimes, NCIS: Hidden Crimes and Growtopia. Yannick previously worked in marketing and wealth management at UBS and was a professional ice hockey player. 

Ryan has been a professional game developer for over 15 years. He has a breadth of experience that includes working with start-ups using proprietary game engines to international studios using Unity. From the game client to the game server he has done a bit of it all. This includes having implemented systems for gameplay, graphics, input, AI, assets, networking (of course), and more. And it all sparked from a shareware copy of DOOM!

Lifelong gamer turned Unity Developer Advocate, Ben Mcilmoyle joined the Unity team with 8 years experience as a Unity Programmer and 3 years as a College Educator. Ben's most recent work includes developing and optimizing Nintendo Switch ports, real-time multiplayer VR experiences, and simulation with the Microsoft Hololens. Traditionally studying as a low level C++ programmer Ben brings technical expertise and a passion for game development to the education field and aims to inspire the next generation of developers and educators.

Rami Ismail is a Dutch-Egyptian industry ambassador & independent games developer with over 20 titles across PC, console, web, and mobile. His development of tools like the industry-standard dopresskit.com, his prolific & popular public speaking, and highly-regarded consultancy and insights have helped shape industry opportunities for game communities & independent game developers of any kind, in any situation, and anywhere.

Susanna Pollack is the President of Games for Change, the leading global advocate for the power of games and immersive media as drivers of social impact.  In her role there, she produces the annual Games for Change Festival, the largest industry-facing gaming event in New York, dubbed by national media as “the Sundance of video games.” The event attracts industry leaders across game design, emerging technology, media, foundations, government agencies, academia and brands.  In 2017, Susanna launched XR for Change to focus on building a community of practice around how VR/AR/MR technologies are offering radical new ways to improve lives. 

Susanna works also closely with organizations that are actively pursuing digital games and immersive media to further their public or CSR mission. For clients, including American Express, Verizon, Princeton University, AT&T, United Nations, Carnegie Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Ad Council, and Smithsonian Museum, she has initiated dozens of programs to advance the games and immersive media for good sector.

As an Executive Producer, Susanna spearheads impact media projects, bringing together award-winning creators with mission oriented organizations.  Current projects include 38 Minutes a partnership with renowned studios Archer’s Mark and Atlas V and Princeton University’s Science and Global Security Department, Oculus and MacArthur Foundation.  The XR experience highlights the issue of nuclear security risk though immersive storytelling and is scheduled to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2020.

With a commitment to learning and education, Susanna also developed a portfolio of programs that advance the use of games and immersive media in learning.  She launched the G4C Student Challenge with the NYC Department of Education in 2015 which now operates in multiple cities across the country and reaches 10,000 students annually. The program has attracted world class partners including the New York Times, NYC Mayors Office, ACLU, X Prize, Truth Initiative, National Geographic to offer a games design challenge to underserved middle and high school students across the country.  For Verizon, she led the development of an XR Hackathon program that is currently being rolled out to 20 Verizon Innovation Schools over the next 2 years.

Prior to Games for Change Susanna worked across both the commercial and public sector.  Over a 14 year period, Susanna held various senior level positions at BBC Worldwide Americas, including SVP of the US television distribution division where she led a team of 20 to raise $50m annually from coproduction and sales of BBC’s award winning documentaries and scripted content. She was also SVP of BBC Worldwide’s Children’s where she led the strategy of all youth related initiatives in the US including channel and IP development. 

Jen MacLean leads worldwide business development for small and mid-sized game studios for Amazon Game Tech, where she helps game developers around the world build better games and more successful companies.  A lifelong gamer, Jen has held various senior roles in game development over her career, most recently leading the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and IGDA Foundation.  Jen earned an MBA from the Columbia Business School and a BA from the Johns Hopkins University.

Ted Price is President and founder of Insomniac Games, Inc. - a videogame developer with offices in Burbank, CA and Durham, NC. In 2019 Insomniac was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Since 1994 Insomniac has created high profile game franchises in the console, VR, AR and mobile spaces. Some of its more popular creations include the Spyro the Dragon series, the Ratchet and Clank series, the Resistance: Fall of Man series, Sunset Overdrive and Marvel’s Spider-Man.  

Insomniac’s games have sold over 75 million units worldwide since the company’s inception. Insomniac has also won numerous local, state and national workplace awards for its unique culture.

Price's responsibilities at Insomniac include directing the company's strategic planning and day-to-day business as well as contributing to its projects. Price also serves on the board of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. He graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in English.

Demetri Detsaridis is a longtime games industry executive, consultant, and entrepreneur and is the Executive Producer of the MSG Interactive team at the Madison Square Garden company. Focused on creating new types of interactive entertainment ranging from live massively multiplayer experiences to immersive digital theater, MSG Interactive’s initial target platform are the forthcoming Sphere venues, the first of which is under construction in Las Vegas right now. Prior to joining MSG, Demetri’s most recent venture was Experiment 7, an independent VR games studio he co-founded in 2015 that released three hit titles in three years including Catan VR, a #1 seller on the Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Go and Steam VR platforms. Demetri’s twenty-year career in games has included many positions in the indie games world, both as a core team member (General Manager of Area/Code, co-founder and Creative Director of Massively Mobile, Producer/Game Designer at Pop & Co.) and as a consultant for studios ranging from five-person mobile teams to household names in the console space. He has also worked quite a bit for larger games developers and publishers (Zynga, Gameloft, Warner Bros./DC Comics) but he’ll save those details for a different bio. 

Shannon Studstill is the Studio Director for Stadia Games & Entertainment Playa Vista Studio.  Shannon leads the entire Playa Vista team and is responsible for the creative and execution efforts of building first party games for Stadia.

Prior to joining Google, Shannon was the head of Sony Santa Monica Studio, one of the most prolific game studios in the industry, including serving as executive producer of the God of War franchise, including the 2019 Game of the Year, God of War.  Other titles that blossomed under Shannon’s leadership include Journey, Unfinished Swan, Escape Plan, Sound Shapes, Twisted Metal and many more. 

She has been honored for her work in video games and has held a variety of advisory and board positions throughout the industry.  She has also spoken at industry events, including delivering the keynote at the IGDA Leadership Forum.  Shannon is dedicated to maintaining the creative development atmosphere and multidisciplinary production philosophy that has delivered over a decade of mainstream, award winning, and critical successes.  She was also listed as one of the "Game Industry's 100 Most Influential Women" by EDGE Magazine. 

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