All my life I’ve been fascinated with games. The fascination ranged from spending hours playing on Nintendo GameCube to creating my own Survivor challenges for my cousins whenever they would visit. Over time, this evolved into a love for entertainment, and also understanding how we are entertained.

I graduated from Bates College with a double major in Theater (Directing) and Neuroscience. What may seem like odd choices in majors made perfect sense to me. I would learn how our minds worked, and experiment with those findings in my theatrical production. After graduation, and some years of soul searching, I fully committed to pursuing a career in the games industry.

My first job was at Proletariat, Inc. as Office Manager in 2019. However, after 3 months of moving the team to a new office, COVID hit. I no longer had an office to manage. I took this as an opportunity to learn project management, helping our People Operations team track our work, implement new company initiatives, and coordinate social events both in person and online. I immediately fell in love with this work. To me, project management had a lot of transferable skills from both my theater directing and neuroscience experience. Directing requires skills in people management, team collaboration, and communication. Neuroscience requires documentation and data management. It was a perfect match.

From here, I further refined my project management and game development skills. I received by CSM and CAPM certifications. I volunteered in QA and Marketing, playtesting, and shadowed producers on games such as Spellbreak, Valorant, and World of Warcraft. I led the Proletariat, Inc. Extra Life 24 Hour Charity Stream from 2020-2022, raising over $40,000 for the Boston Children’s Hospital over the 3 years. After Proletariat, Inc. was acquired by Blizzard Entertainment, I transitioned to Project Coordinator for the People Experience PMO team at Activision Blizzard King. Here I managed the project intake process and led various projects. The largest project I led was the transfer of 100+ King US employees from one payroll system to another. This project had over 100 stakeholders in disciplines such as payroll, benefits, IT, and finance. I created and managed our documentation (e.g. project plan, risk register, stakeholder matrix). I ran the project kickoff and weekly syncs. I collaborated with our Change Management and Process Improvement teams on launch communications. Additionally, to help get this project to launch on time, I negotiated a temporary compromise with King Senior Leadership on their project work.

Outside of work, I make games and coordinate teams. In the summer of 2019 I joined the Owlet Tournament, an amateur Overwatch league, as Logistics Specialist where I managed forms, spreadsheets, and data for the league. I’ve made two games as part of game jams. The first, Lightbender, I worked on game and level design. The second, a solo bosh rush game called The Scrapper, I wrote a production plan, self taught GameMaker Studio, designed and programmed the game, ran playtests, sourced assets, and published the final product. I’m currently working on a new monster catching solo project in Godot.

Fun Facts

• The dog’s name is Millie. She lives with my parents. She loves going for walks, ice cream, and cuddling with you on the couch.

• My favorite animals are otters! They make me unreasonably happy. I’m on the search to find an aquarium that will, ethically, let me spend a day with otters.

• I’m an avid D&D Dungeon Master. I’ve ran a homebrew campaign for over 3 years. I’m committed to running my games in the same homebrew world for all my life, then write all the stories for those who participated in my games.

• I play competitive Pokemon VGC. The video game allows so much creativity with your teams, while also emphasizing position and planning. These are some of my favorite aspects of games. My self project is inspired by the competitive game.

• Two truths and a lie: I’ve performed brain surgery. I’ve performed heart surgery. I’ve performed spinal surgery. Reach out and I’ll tell you the answer!