# Christy Dena

Christy Dena is an Australian writer, game designer, and scholar. Her scholarship and design practice in transmedia storytelling has been widely cited, especially for promoting the term "cross-media storytelling". She is also known for defining the term "transmedial fictions" for The Johns Hopkins Encyclopedia of Digital Textuality. She created her own studio, Universe Creation 101, where she creates original projects and does consultations and freelance work. She likes to combine live social experiences with online technology, traditional forms of screen (film and games) and paper-based objects (tabletop and books).

## Education

Dena completed her PhD at the University of Sydney in 2009.

## Career

Dena was the first Digital Writer in Residence for the Australia Council for the Arts and the Queensland University of Technology at The Cube. She currently serves as the Program Co-ordinator of the Master of Creative Industries at the SAE Creative Media Institute, Brisbane. She has worked on games for Cisco and Nokia, and is a member of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Emmys).
She has served as a mentor; is supervising Artistic Fellows at the CEFIMA, Norwegian Film School; and is teaching at Griffith University. Dena works closely with unceded Boonwrrung Country.

## Selected publications

* Dena, Christy (2005). "Elements of 'interactive drama': Behind the virtual curtain of Jupiter Green". Performance Paradigm. 1.
* Dena, Christy (2007). "Capturing polymorphic creations: towards ontological heterogeneity and transmodiology". Proceedings of the 4th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment. RMIT University, Melbourne: 1–8.
* Dena, Christy (2008). "The future of digital media culture is all in your head: an argument for integration cultures" (PDF). Leonardo Electronic Almanac. 16.
* Dena, C. (2008). "Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games". Convergence. 14 (1): 41–57. doi:10.1177/1354856507084418.
* Dena, Christy (2009). Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments. University of Sydney.
* Dena, Christy (2009). "Beyond Multimedia, Narrative, and Game: The Contributions of Multimodality and Polymorphic Fictions". In Page, Ruth (ed.). New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality. doi:10.4324/9780203869437. ISBN 9781135254612.
* Dena, Christy (2012). "The scaredy cat factor". In Pickering, K (ed.). The emerging writer : an insider's guide to your writing journey. Emerging Writers' Festival, Australia. pp. 3–6.
* Dena, Christy (2016). "Finding a way: reducing design schema friction in narrative design" (PDF). Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA.

## Other works

Dena has worked on alternate reality games: Nokia's Conspiracy for Good, Cisco's The Hunt, and the Australian Broadcasting Company's Bluebird AR. She has also created touch-screen installations for The Cube (Robot University) at Queensland University of Technology and at the Experimenta Biennial of Media Art.
Dena was inspired to write AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS after the passing of her mother, which led to her contemplating her own mortality.
She has also exhibited her work, such as Recharge at the 6th International Biennial of Media Art.
In 2010, she presented a TedXTransmedia talk on Dare to Design.

## Awards

Dena has won interactive writing awards from the Australian Writers' Guild and WA Premier's Book Awards for (AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS).