Mary Flanagan is an internationally renowned media theorist and artist who investigates the intersection of art, technology and gender study through critical writing, artwork and activism. She explores the relationships between humans and technological systems. The impacts of technologies such as games, mobile phones, electronic communication etc. are linked to human desires and intimacy, language and conceptual space. Her particular interest thereby is on play culture, activist design and critical play. She understands her inquiries as a hybrid system of research, process and performance.
Flanagan is the creator of The Adventures of Josie True, the first web-based adventure game developed specifically for girls, and is also founding director of Tiltfactor, a research laboratory for designing games of different types and studying their social impact. Her art was featured in 8 BIT, a documentary about video game art.
Flanagan is a graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and holds an MA degree from the University of Iowa. She earned her PhD in Computational Media from Central Saint Martins in London. She holds the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digitial Humanities at Dartmouth College and has been an American Council of Learned Societies fellow, a Brown Foundation Fellow, and a MacDowell Colony Fellow.
Her work has been promoted by The British Arts Council, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities among others. She has given keynote speeches at TEDx, the Museum of Modern Art New York, IndieCadie and Women in Games. She has written five books including Critical Play (2009) and Values at Play in Digital Games (2014) and her work is frequently published in the press as well as online. Flanagan’s artwork has been exhibited internationally. Venues include Tate Britain, ZKM, Guggenheim New York, Ars Electronica, Media Arts Dortmund, SIGGRAPH,The Banff Centre, Maryland Institute College of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. maryflanagan.com
