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Suzanne Seggerman

BIO

Suzanne Seggerman is an award-winning non-profit and new media thought leader. She is an international advisor, consultant and public speaker on games and media for social impact.

Founding the award-winning non-profit Games for Change (G4C), she has served as an advisor for a wide variety of social impact projects in including The President's Innovate To Educate STEM Initiative, Michelle Obama's Healthy Kids Campaign, Microsoft's Imagine Cup, Scholastic's Art and Writing Awards, the Knight Foundation's News Game Awards, Global Contents Forum Seoul, and many others. She is also the Co-founder of PETLab (Prototyping, Evaluating, Teaching, Learning), a public interest design and research lab for interactive media at the New School, launched with the support of mTV and the MacArthur Foundation.

Co-founder and former President of Games for Change (G4C), the leading global advocate for social impact games, Suzanne started the organization in 2004 with the belief that games can change the world — for the better. Known as "the Sundance of Video Games" for "socially-conscious game-makers," Games for Change is the leading global advocate for games in the public interest.

Suzanne served as catalyzer and primary evangelist for the new movement, and has given talks and keynotes at conferences and festivals around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, PDF, NTEN, PopTech, and the Harvard Human Rights Conference. She has been featured in a wide variety of press including the New York Times, Time Magazine, ABC News, The Korea Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, and more. She also acted as the lead curator and artistic director of the Games for Change Festival, now in its ninth year, growing the event from a small 40-person gathering to the largest game event in New York City and world's foremost social impact games event.

Suzanne was named one of 10 Tech Pioneers by Contribute Magazine, one of the 2008 "Women Leading in Technology in Politics and Policy," and was shown on the Sundance Channel in their New Revolutionaries series. She has been featured in several books, including Fun Inc: Why Games are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield (Virgin Books, 2010) and Julia Moulden's The New Radicals: A Manifesto for Reinventing Yourself and Saving the World (McGraw Hill, 2007). Suzanne was an inaugural winner of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Award.

Before G4C, Suzanne was a director at NYC-based think tank Web Lab, where she co-curated the show "Provocations" in 2002, the first national exhibition of digital games about social-issues, which featured the work of Natalie Jerimijenko, Natalie Bookchin, Brody Condon, Michael Mateas, Tamiko Thiel, and Anne-Marie-Schleiner. Her own background in creating new media included community-oriented interactive environments and the design of alternative games, which earned her awards from New Voices New Visions and Communications Arts.

Before joining Web Lab, Suzanne worked in documentary film, including on the award-winning PBS series, "The West," created by Stephen Ives and Ken Burns and as co-producer on "Race for Life," the first film and humanitarian aid project about environmental issues in Eastern Europe shortly after the fall of communism.

Suzanne holds a BA in French Philosophy from Kenyon College and a Masters degree from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Suzanne is also a nationally rated Scrabble player.