Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (“Tess”) is a songwriter, performer, game designer, artist, activist, and practicing witch. She recently left a tenured position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine where she was a founding member of the Transformative Play Lab. Her most recent book on Playful Wearable Technologies, co-authored with Katherine Isbister, Elena Marquez-Segura, Ella Dagan, and Oguz Burak, was released by The MIT Press in early 2024.
Dr. Tanenbaum’s work is playful, provocative, and interdisciplinary, frequently straddling the line between art, design, research, and activism. In her work she seeks to create possibilities for social and individual change, using participatory narrative to highlight how the identities that we inhabit in the world are contingent and negotiated. These experiences of transformative play create possibility models that are emancipatory, allowing oppressed and marginalized people to inhabit new identities that create possibilities where there were none before and reclaim power and agency denied to them. Recently she has incorporated her magical practice into her scholarship and activism, teaching a graduate seminar on Identity, Magic, and Social Change Through Play, and speaking on “Restorying Game Studies: Playing with memory, fiction, and magic as sites for transformative identity work” at venues throughout the US and Europe.
During the COVID-19 pandemic Tess wrote an autobiographical musical about marriage, gender transition, and self-discovery that is currently under production at Omniverse Media, to be distributed by the Fable and Folly network as a serialized audio drama. She is also the co-creator of Etude of the Storm, an upcoming historical fantasy audio drama of mythic proportions that puts the “trans” into “transdimensional narrative”, also under production at Omniverse, due for release in 2025.
An experienced game designer, Tess’s work incorporates physical objects, wearable technology, and interactive tabletops to explore embodied interactions with digital games and stories. Her forthcoming game, Alchemist’s Ink, is a handcrafted boutique analog gaming experience for four players that combines ritual, gameplay, theater, and narrative. Players draw magical tattoos on themselves and each other using a black walnut ink that she brewed on the winter solstice out of nuts that she foraged from her land.
She has developed new gaming technologies that push the boundaries of personal fabrication, using 3D printers and laser cutters as platforms for hybrid digital/physical games. Her game, Magia Transformo: The Dance of Transformation, was an official selection of IndieCade in 2017: the largest festival of independent games in the world. It uses costumes and movement to help players adopt the personas of witches and warlocks to uncover the secret magical history of the world. Tess was also active as a “Steampunk” artist, and maker, whose work on DiY culture appears in the book Vintage Tomorrows and the documentary film of the same name. Dr. Tanenbaum has been instrumental in helping create new, more inclusive, policies within the academic publishing world that make it possible for people to correct their names on previously published scholarship. She joined an ACM working group in June of 2019 to help develop a trans inclusive name change policy for the ACM Digital Library. Working with two other volunteers, she led the writing and revision process of a new policy that was adopted by the ACM in November of 2019. This policy, the first of its kind to be adopted by a major publisher, allows transgender authors to correct their names on previously published work. In July of 2020 she published a worldview article in Nature advocating for these policies in the academic publishing world. In 2020 she co-founded the Name Change Policy Working Group to support other transgender people in advocating for inclusive identity policies within publishing and beyond. She has worked with Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the ACM, SAGE, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, and many other publishers to develop identity practices in publishing that safeguard the privacy of transgender authors seeking to update their scholarly records to reflect their correct names.
Find her at
- https://cauldronfirestudios.com/
- https://transformativeplay.ics.uci.edu/
- https://ncpwg.org/
- https://medium.com/@tesstanenbaum
