Samantha Gorman is a writer, artist, curator, and educator. Her work combines text, cinema, games, virtual reality, and scholarship about digital media. With Danny Cannizzaro she founded the indie game and art studio Tender Claws. Tender Claws, which began at MacDowell, creates novel approaches to interactive narrative through emerging media like AR/VR. In 2017 we created the VR game Virtual Virtual Reality (V-VR), which won “Best VR Experience” at the Google Play Awards and became one of the best selling apps on Oculus Go. In 2018 we premiered Tendar, a long-form AR narrative about a virtual pet fish that turns users’ emotions into food, at Sundance New Frontier and released it in November 2018 to android phones in partnership with Google AR/VR. PRY, another of our mobile apps, was named by Apple as one of the Best Apps of 2015. This January 2019 we were back at the Sundance Film Festival previewing our new Virtual Reality experience The Under Presents, which brings live actors into the living room of players through a networked multiplayer game. Future projects include an essay told through video and gameplay about humans’ attempts to both poignantly and hilariously communicate with other species, as well as a VR game about the collapse of the metaverse. Tender Claws is located in Los Angeles. In addition to co-founding Tender Claws, Samantha holds a M.F.A. from Brown University in writing for digital media and has taught at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently completing a Ph.D. in media arts and practice specializing in critical practice-based research on immersive media and creative writing at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.
Samantha Gorman
Studios
Mixter
Samantha Gorman worked in the Mixter studio.
Built in 1927–1930, the Florence Kilpatrick Mixter Studio was funded by its namesake and designed by the architect F. Winsor, Jr., who also designed MacDowell's original Savidge Library in 1925. Mixter Studio, solidly built of yellow and grey-hued granite, once had sweeping views of Pack Monadnock to the east. The lush forest has now grown…