About

Jessie Contour is a designer, animator, maker, and educator. She makes projects that question the nature of complex systems and what it means to be alive. Her process includes research, storytelling, rapid prototyping, collaboration and iteration. She has worked with AAA video game studios, museums, educational programs, and startups. Within these fields her focus has been on creating interactive experiences for art, play, and education. She has built digital tools for community engagement , designed the newest permanent exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History to teach children about earthquakes, and launched video games as part of a global team. She also enjoys creating public art and has worked on two projects with the NYC Department of Transportation to beautify public spaces.

Jessie has been teaching classes in animation and game design since 2013, her teaching philosophy is based in the idea of teaching technical building blocks as a way to empower students to more completely question the contexts within which they are creating. She is currently an adjunct faculty at Parsons School of Design and Hunter College in NYC where she teaches 3D animation, worldbuilding, storytelling, and game design. She also works as a facilitator with Decoded, a global technology education company, and as the NYC Director of BlueStamp Engineering, a summer engineering program for high schoolers.

In her spare time Jessie trains in powerlifting, and is competing in USAPL Nationals in October 2018. She also is a dungeon master for a few D&D campaigns with friends and recently started working with a local afterschool program to teach middle schoolers how to play.