TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California and a Series Editor of Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press). She teaches courses on video games, digital culture, and popular media like film, television, and streaming platforms.
She is also the director of the Radical Play Game Design Lab, an Associate Editor for Outreach and Equity for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and she has appeared in popular media venues like CNN.
A prolific writer and editor on film, television, games, and other media, Professor Russworm has published widely, including the books Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games; Blackness is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition; and From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry.
She is currently working on three new books on race and gaming cultures.
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Featured Content
“Radical play is play that has the potential to overwhelm and change a system.”
Radical Play Lab
The Radical Play Game Studio is committed to making games that challenge industry and player assumptions by prioritizing diverse perspectives and intentionally subverting dominant representations—games that directly challenge inequitable social-political strictures and systems.
Research
“I have published three books on games and popular media, and I have three more currently in development: The Sims, Antiracist Futures, and Black Lives Gaming. With Jennifer Malkowski, I am also a series Editor for Duke University’s book series on games—Power Play: Games, Politics, and Culture.”
Co-founder and Curator of the Black Games Archive.
“Black Games Archive is a multimedia, public-facing database of games, digital resources, accessible scholarship, and designer interviews that are relevant to the intersections between Black culture, games, and play.”
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Game Design with BIPOC Youth
“Games can be powerful imaginative tools.”
Community Engagement Programs in Springfield, MA and Amherst, MA
Teaching Games and Other Media
“We play a lot of games in my classes and we also spend a lot of time re-imagining new possibilities for old tropes, mechanics, and technologies.”
“Just as I value disrupting hierarchies of text and meaning, so too do I find value in challenging hierarchies of audience and reception—both in games and in other media.”