Samara Hayley Steele, MFA, is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at UC Davis where she is presently researching analog games as a graduate fellow with the the ModLab digital humanities laboratory. She is also an Advanced Research Affiliate with the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at the University of Southern California where she studies emerging media forms.
As part of the alter-globalization movement since 1999, Steele has been part of a number of organizing projects including the Oakland Omni Commons, Occupy the Farm, and PLACE for Sustainable Living.
She has been a practitioner, gamerunner, and maker of interactive narrative media since 2002, and is the larpwright of Thermophiles in Love (2016), a five-gender dating game featured in the gallery of the 30th Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). She was part of the Critical Code Studies Working Group (CCSWG) in 2016 and 2018, and she is a 2018-2020 HASTAC Scholars Fellow.
Steele holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University, and she is a former development director for Land Action, an Oakland-based mutual aid network for land-based adverse possession projects.
