Congratulations to Dr. PB Rivas-Berge for receiving the 2025 Killam Accelerator Research Award

Dr. Persephone Blue (PB) Rivas-Berge, Assistant Professor of Experimental Game Design, has been selected as a recipient of the 2025 Killam Accelerator Research Award. Dr. Blue is cross-appointed in Media & Technology Studies and Women's and Gender Studies and is the co-Director of the Certificate in Computer Games Development.

Dr. Blue’s research interrogates how media technologies produce both harm and possibility. Her academic and creative work contends with these questions through three areas of study: (1) locating trans play in interactive media; (2) documenting and expanding queer game communities’ making practices; and (3) mapping the harms of online hate movements. Vital to these research questions is the continued development of the Critical Research Yielding Playful Technologies (CRYPT) Lab, which Dr. Blue directs. The CRYPT is a collaborative site for research-creation, where Dr. Blue and her fellow “Cryptids”—student researchers and collaborators—design experimental games and media works that explore how media systems might resist exclusionary logics and how trans liberation necessitates playful futures.

The Killam Accelerator Research Award—funded by the generous Izaak Walton and Dorothy Killam bequest and valued at $225,000—is competitively awarded to two early-career faculty members across the University each year. These faculty members are selected “based on the outstanding promise shown by the faculty member in their research output and the impact of their scholarly activity” and the award supports them over a three-year term.

Since first opening in 2025, the CRYPT has already supported award-winning media projects, hosted University-wide workshops on media research and game design, and undertaken a SSHRC-funded Insight Development Grant project alongside trans and queer game developers and community organizers. The award will provide key support to several of Dr. Blue's ongoing projects, including her manuscripts in progress, conference presentations and publications with students in her lab, operations of the CRYPT lab, and the expenses of research-creation materials.

Dr. Blue wishes to express their deepest gratitude to the award committee, their referees, her colleagues and collaborators across the University, and to her fellow Cryptids.