Jermaine Anthony Richards is a critical scholar of computational, digital, and interactive media, with particular interests in video games, virtual worlds, and immersive environments. His work examines the media organizations, institutions, and stakeholders that shape the political and economic power dynamics surrounding these media forms. Working across communication and media studies, Black studies, and science and technology studies, his dissertation investigates how media institutions and industries construct the cultural and intellectual phenomenon known as the “social impact game.” He works with archival, institutional, comparative, and object-following methods. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Renaissance Reader (eds. Kinitra D. Brooks and Nicholas R. Jones) and the International Journal of Communication.
Richards is a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, a USC Provost’s Fellow, a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEdProject, and a Dean’s Endowed Dissertation Fellow of the USC Graduate School. He is dually affiliated with the School of Cinematic Arts’ Interactive Media & Games Division, where he is a Senior Producer and Research Manager at the Radical Play Lab.
His research draws on eighteen years of professional experience across creative advertising strategy, planning, and media production; branded entertainment; and digital development policy. He entered advertising through a specialized New York City high school founded in a 2008 partnership with Interpublic Group, Omnicom Group, WPP, and Publicis Groupe, where he began his career in media strategy, planning, and production at McCann and Deutsch before joining Wieden+Kennedy as a producer. At Wieden+Kennedy, he led the production of Momo Pixel’s Hair Nah, a game about the politics of uninvited touch. The game has been exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the MassArt Art Museum; showcased at Tate Modern and the V&A, and accessioned into the permanent collection of The Strong National Museum of Play. It is taught globally, featured in The New York Times and international press, and examined in books and scholarly venues, including American Literature.
As a Fellow at New America’s Digital Impact and Governance Initiative, Richards led a landscape analysis of digital transformation across five Lower Mekong countries for the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The project’s recommendations aimed to inform aid distribution for disadvantaged ethnic groups in the region. His recent public writing focused on creative industries and policy has appeared in Ad Age and Fair Observer.
Richards holds an MSc in Global Media from the London School of Economics and Political Science; MAs in Global Communication and in Communication from USC Annenberg; and a BS in Communications Technology with Studio Art from York College, City University of New York.