Katie Salen Tekinbaş

Katie Salen Tekinbas is an American game designer, animator, and educator. She is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught at DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media, Parsons The New School for Design the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has an MFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Salen has received grants as principal investigator or co-principal investigator from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and Intel. She is one of the co-authors of Rules of Play, a textbook on game design, and the co-editor of The Game Design Reader, a Rules of Play Anthology, as well as the co-editor of The International Journal of Learning and Media.

She is the former Director of Graduate Students for the Design and Technology Program at Parsons The New School for Design, as well as the former Director of the Center for Transformative Media, a research center focused on emerging trends in design and media. She is the Executive Director of Institute of Play, a non-profit learning design studio that bases its work on the principles of games and play.

In 2009, she helped design and launch Quest to Learn (Q2L), a public school in Manhattan, New York City, and later participated in developing ChicagoQuest, a charter school in Chicago. Salen's work has involved the development of slow games, online games, mobile games, and big games, both commercially and institutionally.

Salen graduated from the University of Texas in 1990 with a B.A. in Fine Arts. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD, she studied semiotics with Tom Ockerse, who focused on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. She also worked with designers Jan van Toorn of the Netherlands, Michael Rock, and Sharon Poggenpohl. She has an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Bank Street College of Education.

In 2001, Salen started to work at gameLab, where she still serves as a member of the advisory board as of 2010. In 2002, Creative Time in New York hired Salen to develop the curriculum and workshops for the Blur Conference. From 2002–2003, she was a writer and animator for music videos for the band Zero7, which had extended play on MYV, MTV and VH1. Also from 2002–2003, Salen was asked to design the Big Urban Game (BUG), a citywide multiplayer game which was to be played by the residents of Minneapolis and St.Paul in Minnesota as part of the Twin Cities Design Celebration.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center engaged Salen to co-curate with Graham Leggatt, the director of the society, "Game Engine", an evening of programming for the New York Video Festival in 2003. In that same year, Salen started writing for RES Magazine, which focuses on film, design, culture, art and music; She continued as a contributor until 2006. Also in 2003, Salen worked as part of a research team to create and design an interactive, animated storytelling experience that was to be distributed through Xbox Live!