Search Results

Hanna Berggren is a Community Manager at SYBO, the mobile games studio behind Subway Surfers. She leads community and creator initiatives for Subway Surfers and Subway Surfers City, working across social media, influencer marketing, and community engagement to support one of the world's most widely played mobile games. With five years of experience across marketing, social media, and community management, Hanna has led major influencer campaigns, supported esports events, and managed social channels reaching over 30 million followers. She also runs the Subway Surfers Creator Club, SYBO's creator ambassador program. Originally from Sweden and now based in Copenhagen, Hanna is a passionate gamer who enjoys everything from RuneScape and The Sims to Animal Crossing, Baldur's Gate, and the occasional quick Fortnite match.

For more than 30 years, Sébastien Croteau has explored the limits of the human voice through performance, teaching, and game audio production. Beginning as a metal vocalist in 1991, he developed extensive expertise in extreme vocals, vocal effects, and vocally demanding performances. A vocal coach for more than 15 years and a New York Vocal Coaching Certified Vocal Distortion Teacher, he has trained performers in the development and sustainable use of demanding vocal techniques. Since 2005, Sébastien has worked professionally as a voice actor, performing more than 400 creatures, monsters, and characters across more than 60 films and video games, including Marvel Deadpool VR, Fortnite, Helldivers 2, Cronos: The New Dawn, FBC: Firebreak, Baldur's Gate 3, Star Wars Outlaws, Hellblade II, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, Dead by Daylight, Genshin Impact, Until Dawn, and many others. In addition to his work as a performer, Sébastien is a voice director, casting director, and producer specializing in vocally demanding performances. Since 2018, he has led more than 40 productions, collaborating with studios, directors, and performers to develop recording workflows that balance production efficiency, performance quality, and vocal sustainability. An international speaker on game audio and voice production, Sébastien has delivered more than 20 presentations across nine countries at conferences including GDC, GameSoundCon, Devcom, Nordic Game, One Voice Conference, and Gamescom LATAM. Known for his engaging and practical presentation style, Sébastien combines decades of experience as both a performer and production professional to share practical insights into game audio, voice production, creature vocalizations, and vocally demanding performances.

Best known for roles in blockbuster AAA titles (Fortnite, Halo Infinite, Gears 5) and critically acclaimed indie games (Afterparty, Pyre, Gone Home), Sarah has over a decade of experience giving her voice to interactive projects, as well as providing both voice and first-person performance capture for Anthem's player character, the Freelancer. Led by her desire to foster stronger collaboration within games and across creative communities, she has been an organizing and educating force in games spaces (such as IndieCade) and institutions (USC, NYU) for many years, while nurturing meaningful exchange between game developers and the actor's union, SAG-AFTRA. She has extended this work into a consultancy, offering developers assistance with the union, casting, and recording process. Sarah's latest professional and creative evolution is as a sought-after voice director for indies (The Red Lantern, The Wreck) and AAA (Fortnite) alike. Drawing on her years of immersion in the development community and her experience as an actor, she relishes the opportunity to cultivate a safe, fun, effective and team-based performance atmosphere.

For over 15 years, Jeff Hesser worked on video games like Rock Band and Fortnite Festival at Harmonix and then Epic Games as a 3D Art Generalist with a focus on Gameplay/Interaction Prototypes and Environment Art/Level Design. Jeff is also an accomplished figure sculptor, and his sculptures have been featured in exhibitions at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, the Dahesh Museum, the National Sculpture Society and the Parrish Art Museum. In addition to his work as an artist, Jeff has more than a decade of experience as a teacher and received the Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. Over the past decade of GDC's Jeff has brought together his background as a game dev, teacher and sculptor to give talks and run roundtables on effective ways to give and receive feedback. He now runs workshops at schools and companies on this topic. In GDC summits, he's delivered talks about innovative ways to create gaze-reactive UI in virtual reality (VR) and integrate VR with public spaces. Jeff has also explored creative ways to use interactive, real-time rendering outside the context of video games. As a founding member of Secret Portal, he worked with an interdisciplinary team to create events at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that combined virtual reality with physical spaces. In another side project called Circle, he worked with two musicians to design and prototype a zen-like, calming audio-visual experience in VR. As the founder of Slow Monkey, an independent studio developing mindfulness-focused digital tools and transformative, impact-oriented games, he's creating alternatives to traditional engagement loops with slow, deliberate digital interactions and gaming experiences that prioritize presence and slowing down over distraction and speeding up.

Celia Hodent is recognized as a leader in the application of user experience (UX) and cognitive science in the game industry. Celia holds a PhD in psychology and has close to 20 years of experience in the development of UX strategy and processes in video game studios. Through her work at Ubisoft, LucasArts, and as Director of UX at Epic Games (Fortnite), she has contributed to many projects across multiple platforms, from PC to consoles, mobile, and VR. Celia is also the founder & chair of the Game UX Summit and a member of the Foresight Committee at CNIL (National Commission on Informatics and Liberty, an independent French administrative regulatory body). She currently works as an independent consultant, helping studios increase the likelihood of their games to be engaging and successful. Celia also provides guidance on the topics of playful learning, ethics (founder of ethicalgames.org), unconscious bias, and inclusion in tech.

Hari Leigh is a voice and performance capture director with nearly twenty years of experience across film, television, and interactive media. Her credits include some of the industry's most beloved AAA titles. She has served as a voice and performance director on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Donkey Kong Bananza, Star Fox, Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, III, and 4, and a casting director for Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Marvel's Wolverine. A trained actor and award-winning screenwriter, Hari brings her narrative sensibility to her work translating the writer's vision to the performance talent. Her feature screenplay Driverless won the Barnard College Athena List in 2023, and she is an alumna of the Stowe Story Labs. Inspired by authentic, emotionally grounded performances, Hari partners closely with actors and development teams to create characters that surprise and engage players from all walks of life.

Grant Shonkwiler first started making games when he was 12 years old, starting with modding and programming. Since then he has filled many different roles in the game industry: programmer, lead designer, technical producer and currently is a leadership coach and production consultant. His career has taken him from casual games at Megatouch Games, to AAA shooters at id Software and to Epic Games to work on Fortnite. Grant currently runs his own consulting company, and is the co-author of four books including Gear Up: Advanced Game Development Practices. Grant also enjoys building communities within the industry working with the IGDA and the GameDevDrinkup.

Brendon Williams is an accomplished composer with extensive experience creating music for AAA games. He frequently writes music for some of the industry's largest franchises, most recently having co-composed for 2025's releases of Destiny 2: Renegades, Fortnite, and more. From 2020 through 2023, he worked in-house at Riot Games as a senior composer. As as freelancer, he frequently collaborates with other composers, and has composed on the music teams for World of Warcraft, Star Wars: Outlaws, Destiny 2, Guild Wars 2, Call of Duty: WWII, Legends of Runeterra, Fortnite, and more.