Third Annual Symposium on the Future Imaginary: Elizabeth LaPensée, Owisokon Lahache, and Rilla Khaled!

19 sleeps until the symposium!! This week we’re introducing three cool humans, Elizabeth LaPensée, Ph.D., Owisokon Lahache, and Dr. Rilla Khaled. See you soon!

Elizabeth LaPensée, Ph.D. expresses herself through writing, design, and art in games, comics, transmedia, and animation. She is Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish, living near the Great Lakes as an Assistant Professor of Media & Information and Writing, Rhetoric & American Cultures at Michigan State University. She designed and created art for Thunderbird Strike (2017), a side-scrolling lightning-searing, talon-tearing attack on oil operations, as well as Honour Water (2016), an Anishinaabe singing game for healing the water.

Owisokon Lahache from the Kahnawake Mohawk First Nations reserve outside of Montreal Quebec. She is grateful to have been honored and entrusted with teaching her community’s teenage children for more than 31 years. She is an artist, a teacher, an Elder, a Grandmother and knowledgeable about Iroquoian history, ceremony, and community life. She has been creating art since she was a child and at 11 years old, she participated in a two-day live drawing event at the Indian Pavilion at Expo ’67 – this event was the beginning of her love of creating art and today she is exploring new pathways dreaming about the future and exploring new medias.

Dr. Rilla Khaled is an Associate Professor at the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Canada. Her research and practice has centered on the design of learning and persuasive games, interactions between games and culture, and practices involved in emerging forms of game design. Two of her current projects include the FRQSC-funded Speculative Play and Reflective Game Design, both of which concern design perspectives that embrace ambiguous subjects, foreground play, empower the perspectives of players and participants, and draw on experimental games and new media art.