Background & Credentials

Theresa Jean Tanenbaum, Ph. D.

Hi! I'm Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (“Tess” – she/her). I'm a consultant, designer, scholar, speaker, songwriter, poet, performer, storyteller, artist, activist, and practicing witch. I recently left a tenured position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine where I was a founding member of the Transformative Play Lab. I completed my Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University in 2015 in the School of Interactive Arts + Technology, where I also received her MA. As a graduate student I was the recipient of the Pacific Century Graduate Scholarship, the first inaugural Graduate Research Award in Interactive Arts + Technology, and the SFU Dean’s Convocation Medal. I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Music Composition and Ancient Near Easter Mythology from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands.

This website is stull under construction, but if you are interested in the nitty gritty details of my qualifications and expertise, you can click the button below to download a (fairly) recent copy of my academic CV.

As a PhD candidate Tess served as a consulting researcher at the Nokia Chief Technology Office’s Advanced Engineering group where she advised on matters of storytelling and wearable technology for the Internet of Things. His work incorporates physical objects, wearable technology, and interactive tabletops to explore embodied interactions with digital games and stories. Collaborating with Karen Tanenbaum, she created The Reading Glove:a tangible, wearable, work of electronic literature where a reader explores a collection of evocative physical objects to piece together a historical narrative. 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.

During her time at UCI, Tess explored the intersection of live performance and MR/AR/VR technologies. Collaborating with Tim and Pamela Kashani of Apples and Oranges Arts she developed Virtual Reality systems that transform how we think about creative practice in the performing arts. These include ShadowCast, a VR networked theatrical performance platform and VirDAW, a VR digital audio workstation (created in collaboration with UCI Drama Professor Vincent Olivieri). She was the recipient of an Epic MegaGrant along with collaborators Tawny Schlieski of Shovels + Whiskey, Juliette Levy of UC Riverside, and Thomas Winsor and Pip Brignal of The Round to develop a new location based interactive storytelling platform called alt: intended to facilitate acts of creative “restorying” that envision alternate histories where injustices have been averted and oppressive systems have been dismantled. She also received an NSF grant with Oliver Haimson of University of Michigan entitled “Designing Technologies for Marginalized Communities” that is focused on the design and creation of “trans technologies”. 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 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.

She was one of fourteen founding members appointed to SIGCHI CARES, a volunteer group that serves as a resource for those who experience discrimination and/or harassment while participating in Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI) events, activities, and publications. She also served on the board of the QueerHCI SIG, where she focused on identifying policy challenges around LGBTQ+ identities within the ACM and SIGCHI organizations and developing remedies. She served in 2021 as the VP for Publications on the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee, where she helped organize the Equity Talk series, and advocated for more inclusive identity practices within the ACM. She also served on the board of the Association of Research into Digital Interactive Narrative (ARDIN), as the Chair of Diversity and Inclusion. She was a Beall Faculty Innovation Fellow from 2021-2022.

Although she is no longer at UC Irvine she continues to write, publish, and speak on her areas of scholarship. She recently taught a course on Design for Civic Engagement as a guest instructor at Illinois State University in the School of Creative Technologies.

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