Elizabeth LaPensee, Ph.D. is Narrative Director at Twin Suns. She is an award-winning designer, writer, and artist of games and comics who was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018 and inducted into the Global Women in Games Hall of Fame in 2020. She is Anishinaabe, Metis, and Irish currently living in Nkwejong, Michigan. She designed When Rivers Were Trails, a 2D adventure game about land allotment in the 1890s which won the Adaptation Award at IndieCade 2019. She also designed and created art for Thunderbird Strike, a lightning-searing side-scroller game which won Best Digital Media at imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival 2017. Her ongoing contributions were recognized with the Serious Games Community Leadership Award in 2017. Along with creating curriculum for the award-winning Skins Video Game Workshops, she has led game development workshops since 2006 with Indigenous partners such as the The Boys & Girls Club of Bay Mills, Joseph K. Lumsden Bahweting Anishnabe PSA, the Voyageurs Expeditionary School, the Indigenous Youth Empowerment Program, Native Girls Code, and the Aboriginal Youth Science Exchange Camp at Algoma University. Michael A. Sheyahshe is a member of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. A 2003 graduate of the University of Oklahoma, Sheyahshe served as project coordinator for Oklahoma's Red Earth Film Festival 2000, established the Indigenous Film Series and the Festival of Indigenous Visual Entertainment at the University of Oklahoma, and sits on the board of trustees for the Caddo Nation's Heritage Museum.
