Arts Division
Assistant Teaching Professor
Faculty
Digital Arts Research Center
302E
By Appointment via Email
Digital Arts Research Center
Jonaya Kemper is an interdisciplinary educator, designer and games scholar, whose praxis investigates play as a means of liberation. Both her scholarship and design work utilizes intersectionality, storytelling, roleplaying, applied theater and autoethnography as a means to create more inclusive futures and explore a more diverse past.
A distinguished graduate of New York University’s Gallatin Graduate School, Jonaya was awarded the Frances White Award for her thesis work, Playing to Create Ourselves: Exploring Larp and Visual Autoethnographic Practice as a Tool of Self Liberation for Marginalized Identities, which contributed the theory of emancipatory bleed to the game studies lexicon. Her extensive credits cover all aspects of games: video, table top, board games, and live action games. An active academic, designer, facilitator and participant in international and domestic larp (live action roleplaying), Jonaya has run larps everywhere from city classrooms to Romanian forests.
An avid believer in immersive and participatory media, Jonaya is proud to have been a part of the Thirsty Sword Lesbians team; the first table top roleplaying game to win a Nebula award for game writing.
