heidi j. boisvert

Heidi Boisvert (PhD) is a new media artist, experience designer, creative technologist, researcher, and writer who creates groundbreaking games, web interactive, augmented reality and transmedia storytelling experiences for social change, as well as large-scale networked performances in dance and theatre using bio-expressive technology. Heidi founded and serves as the CEO and Creative Director of the futurePerfect lab, a boutique creative agency that works with non-profits, cultural and educational institutions to develop imaginative and playful applications of integrated media and emerging technology. She was formerly the Multi-Media Director at Breakthrough, a global human rights organization, where she designed, developed and virally propagated a wide range of new media and pop culture campaigns that helped raise awareness and instigate policy change on pressing social issues. She created the first 3D social change game, ICED I Can End Deportation, to shift the frame around unfair U.S. immigration policies. ICED was downloaded by over 250,000 players in 166 countries, and earned tremendous media attention (23 newspapers, 134 blogs, 295 radio broadcasts, 68 television broadcasts, and 76 internet news & search engines). She also designed America 2049, a groundbreaking alternative reality game on Facebook about pluralism, featuring Harold Perrineau (LOST), Victor Garber (ALIAS), Cherry Jones (24), Anthony Rapp (RENT) and the comedian Margaret Cho and covered in Kotaku, TIME, Wired, Salon, Fast Company, Washington Post, and Huffington Post, to name a few, and nominated for Games for Change and Katerva awards. Prior to Breakthrough, Heidi taught Digital Media & Media Studies at Hunter College, and launched a free digital media program for low-income youth through Time Warner & NOAA funding. Most recently, Heidi co-founded XTH, an open-source creative biowearable start up. She was named a Harvestworks Creativity + Technology = Enterprise Fellow with support by the Rockefeller Foundation and a Media Impact Fellow at the Harmony Institute and the Norman Lear Center at USC. She has also been an artist-in-residence at Banff New Media Institute, the Waag Society and the Vermont Studio Center, and served as a new media mentor for both the National Latino Producer's Academy and BAVC Producer's Institute. Heidi received her Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is currently the Director of Emerging Media Technology at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) and a research affiliate at MIT OpenDoc Lab.