NATASHA SKULT, PhD

I am CEO and Creative Director at MiTale, an indie game company established in Turku in 2017. Besides leading the company, I am also an academic who recently defended my doctoral thesis, Interactive Storytelling With Quantum Computing, a topic I plan to continue researching with a new research group forming around this field.

In addition, I have been teaching courses on game design, gamification, and digital (game) art for over a decade at the University of Turku and, in more recent years, at Ashesi University in Ghana.

 

Beyond the industry work and academia, I am perhaps best known for her volunteer work as a Board Member (and Chair Emeritus) of IGDA Global and the IGDA Foundation. My current contributions focus on bridging the gap between the games industry and educational curricula by improving communication and alignment between the two. Since 2019, I have led the W Love Games non-profit organization as its co-founder and Chairperson. This followed by launching Finnish Games Week, an annual celebration of the Finnish games industry, which hosts three major conferences in Helsinki together with IGDA Finland and Steel Media.