Speakers
Find a full list of this year's GDC Festival of Gaming speakers here.
Lindsay Grace, Vice President, Principal, Knight Chair, Higher Education Video Game Alliance, Mindtoggle Consulting, University of Miami,
Dr. Lindsay Grace is Knight Chair in Interactive Media and a full professor at the University of Miami School of Communication. He is Vice President for the Higher Education Video Game Alliance andthe principal of Mindtoggle Consulting. He has received the 2026 IndieCade Horizons Faculty of Excellence Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2019 Games for Change Vanguard award. Lindsay's book, Doing Things with Games, Social Impact through Design, is a well-received guide to game design. In 2020, he edited and authored Love and Electronic Affection: a Design Primer on designing love and affection in games. In 2021 he published the Amazon best seller, Black Game Studies, an Introduction to the games, game makers, and scholarship of the African diaspora His work has received awards and recognition from the Games for Change Festival, the Digital Diversity Network, the Association of Computing Machinery's digital arts community , Black Enterprise and others. He authored or co-authored more than 95 papers, articles and book chapters on games since 2009. His creative work has been selected for showcase internationally including New York, Paris, São Paulo, Singapore, Chicago, Vancouver, Istanbul, and others. Lindsay curated or co-curated Blank Arcade (2014-2016), Smithsonian American Art Museum's SAAM Arcade (2014-2017), the Games for Change Festival (2017, 2022, 2023) and others. He has given talks at the Game Developers Conference, SXSW, Games for Change Festival, the Online News Association, the Society for News Design, and many other industry events. He has had appearances on domestic and international television and radio and written editorials published by CNN and others. Between 2013 and 2018 he was the founding director of the American University Game Lab and Studio. He served as Vice President and on the board of directors for the Global Game Jam™ non-profit between 2014-2019. From 2009 to 2013 he was the Armstrong Professor at Miami University's School of Art. Lindsay also served on the board for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) between 2013-2015.