Staff
Michael Chemers
Director
Michael Chemers (MFA, PhD) is a Professor of Dramatic Literature in the Department of Theater Arts at UC Santa Cruz. His work on monsters includes The Monster in Theatre History: This Thing of Darkness (London, UK: Routledge 2018) and Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Disqualification (Routledge 2022). Dr. Chemers is the Founding Director of the Center for Monster Studies.
Formerly the Founding Director of the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dramaturgy Program at Carnegie Mellon University, he joined the faculty of UCSC in 2012. He is also the author of Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) and Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). Dr. Chemers is also an actor, a juggler, and a writer of drama.
Jen Mahal
Associate Director
Jen Mahal spent a decade as a journalist, working for papers including The Key West Citizen, The Huntington Beach Independent, The Newport Beach Daily News and The San Diego Union-Tribune.
A graduate of Chula Vista High School of the Performing Arts and Loyola Marymount University, she moved on to working as a publicist for The Segerstrom Center for the Arts (formerly the Orange County Performing Arts Center) in Costa Mesa. She has also worked as a publicist for the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media and the Santa Cruz Children’s Museum of Discovery.
When not managing her two at-home monsters, she toils to put the monsters in her head down on paper.
Labris Willendorf
Administrator
Labris Willendorf is a UCSC (Kresge) Alumni with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Women's Studies. Besides working as the Center for Monster Studies Administrator, she is a Genomics Institute Personnel Coordinator. Labris is also a published author (How I Became the Love of My Life) and adventurer who is passionate about travel, believes in the magic of monsters and knows that love always wins.
Renée Fox
Co-Director
Renée Fox (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches classes on the gothic imagination, vampires, Victorian literature, Irish Literature, and popular culture. She is the author of The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2023) and co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2021). Her other published writing on monsters, the gothic, and assorted morbid topics includes essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Robert Browning, Standish O’Grady, and W.B. Yeats, as well as on falling 19th-century acrobats and epitaphic Irish poetry. She definitely doesn’t juggle.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Co-Director
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Ph.D) is a Professor of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. He co-directs the Expressive Intelligence Studio, a technical and cultural research group, with Michael Mateas. Noah's research areas include new models of storytelling in games, how games express ideas through play, the literary possibilities of computational media, and how cultural software can be preserved, discovered, and cited. Noah has authored or co-edited five books on games and digital media for the MIT Press, including The New Media Reader (2003). His most recent book is How Pac-Man Eats (2020). Noah's collaborative playable media projects, including Screen and Talking Cure, have been presented by the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Krannert Art Museum, Hammer Museum, and a wide variety of festivals and conferences.
Elizabeth Swensen
Co-Director
Elizabeth Swensen is Assistant Professor of Art and Design: Games and Playable Media in the Performance, Play and Design department, and Principal Faculty in the Digital Arts and New Media graduate program. Her creative research focuses on both metacognitive development outcomes and strategy-based learning in games, and on exploring issues of imposed identity and on the powerful role language plays in enforcing that identity. Her work has been shown at the Independent Games Festival, IndieCade Festival, and the Games For Change Festival. She teaches courses in game design, and brings to the group both an artistic and a scholarly investment in the social and developmental role of monstrous identity in tabletop and video games.
Shi Johnson-Bey
Graduate Student Researcher
Shi Johnson-Bey is a Ph.D. student in the Computational Media Department, advised by Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. His research centers on creating authoring tools for simulation-driven interactive narrative games. Shi has an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and received Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science and Neuroscience from the University of Delaware. He enjoys teaching students about video game design, embarking on new software projects, and snowboarding.