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Bio:

Lori Landay has been researching, creating in, and publishing about virtual worlds for since the previous century. With the rise of consumer VR, more people understand what she’s talking about these days than in 2002, when she presented “Techno-topophilia: Phenomenology, Narrative, & Representations of Virtual Space” at the Technotopias: Texts, Identities, & Technological Cultures Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, but Lori still enjoys incredulous looks when she describes her recent work at Berklee College of Music, Boston. Dr. Landay is Professor of Visual Culture + New Media Studies, an interdisciplinary teacher, scholar, and artist whose creative and critical work explores themes of transformation in audiovisual cultural forms, technology, and perception. In the Liberal Arts Department, she teaches "The Language of Film," "Art + Virtual Reality," "Approaches to Visual Culture," and, in the Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE), "Startup Lab," a design thinking course focused on XR. "Digital Narrative Theory and Practice" is a required course in the Video Game Scoring Minor. She is also the author of two highly successful courses for Berklee Online, "Game Design Principles" and "The Language of Film and Television".

Lori's recent focus is on XR, an umbrella term for extending reality through emerging technologies including virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, motion capture, AI, automation, and in her model of the “new realities,” social mediations of reality. She is a leader in BerkleeXR, the curricular, pedagogical, and programming initiative at Berklee, the Faculty Adviser for the student organization BerkleeXR, and a founding member of Women in the Next Realities, a Meetup group in the greater Boston area. Lori is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Brookline Interactive Group and the Public VR Lab.

Lori plays with theoretical ideas in creative work, using humor and often surprising tactics to question the relationships between the virtual and the actual in our rapidly transforming world. Lori received a Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowship for “Virtual Worlds,” part of her sabbatical project on New Media in 2008-09, which resulted in multiple movies, graphics, interactive virtual art installations, international collaborations, publications, presentations, and curriculum. Lori’s 2015-16 sabbatical project on animation and automation, "The Animated Self" expanded previous work on virtual worlds, avatars, interactive media experiences that loop actual and digital artifacts (ShadowLoop interactive art installation), inquiry into seeming and being (NEH Enduring Questions Grant for "What Is Being?" 2010-12), and scholarship on the processes of contemporary culture. Dr. Landay is the author of two books, I Love Lucy (TV Milestones Series) and Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture, as well as numerous publications on topics including Minecraft, LEGO, virtual worlds, virtual subjectivity, digital narrative, silent film, and gender and comedy.

Her creative work includes virtual art, interactive installation, animation, creative documentary, digital video, and music video. Works have been chosen for the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival, Cyberfest (St. Petersburg, Russia), On the Wall Dance Film Series (Berlin, Germany), and Utopics Swiss Sculpture Exhibition (Biel/Bienne, Switzerland), and won awards such as Best of Show and People's Choice Awards, New Media Consortium (NMC) Summer Conference Art Show; Best Machinimatography Award, International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference SIGVE Group; First Prize, University of Western Australia 3D Art Challenge; and the Mejor Obra De Investigación/Open This End Award of Excellence for Investigative Film.

Her current project, The Immersive Tools Project for Autism and Music Education, is generously funded by a FLY (Faculty Led Innovations) Grant from the Berklee College of Music Office of Faculty Development, and is conducted in collaboration with Rhoda Bernard, Ed.D., Managing Director of the Berklee Institute for Arts Education and Special Needs.