Emperatriz Ung

Emperatriz Ung designs games. Her work takes place at an intersection of creative writing and gaming, where she is interested in the amplification of marginalized voices in the gaming development industry. Having studied English at both undergraduate and graduate levels, she emphasizes narrative in her independent games, dealing in poetry, history, mental health, and restorative justice. You can find several here, one of which, hilos de una historia, was shown in University College London’s documentary film festival.

At UNM, Ung studied English, graduating magna cum laude with a BA thesis supervised by Matthew Hofer, entitled “Absurd Constructions: Poetic Sound Structures in Samuel Beckett’s Watt.” Following graduation, she earned a master’s in English Literature from Georgetown University and an MFA in game design from the NYU Game Center at the Tisch School of the Arts. She has also worked at NYU as an adjunct professor in game studies, and an article to which she contributed, on Game Studies and Asian Diaspora Studies, is forthcoming in a journal from the University of Minnesota Press.

Now, Ung works as a narrative designer at a Manhattan game studio. She is currently finishing a year-long fellowship at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where she guest edited a folio for The Margins. With the mentorship of Carmen Maria Machado, she is writing a memoir that concerns abuse and the American systems of justice and mental illness treatment, building on interactions between form and content. She will be reading a chapter from the work in an event for the AAWW Margins Fellowship that takes place on Friday, March 26 at 7 p.m. ET. Follow this link for more info.