Jesse Schell

Jesse is the CEO of Schell Games, the largest videogame studio in Pennsylvania. He also serves as Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Jesse has worked on a wide variety of innovative game and simulation projects for both entertainment and education, but he is best known for his award winning book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses and for Beyond Facebook, a talk at the 2010 DICE Summit where he described a future where games and life become indistinguishable. He is a former chair of the International Game Developers Association, and in 2004 he was named one of the world's Top 100 Young Innovators by MIT Technology Review. Before starting his own company, Jesse was the Creative Director of the Walt Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, which helped to develop interactive theme park attractions as well as Toontown Online, the first massively multiplayer game for children. Before that, he worked as writer, director, performer, juggler, comedian, and circus artist for both Freihofer's Mime Circus and the Juggler's Guild.