2026 Keynote SPeaker

 Steve Isaacs is the Director of Secondary Education at Epic Games. His mission in this role is to support educators and students in exploring career opportunities that leverage interactive 3d skills. Prior to his role at Epic, Steve was a public school teacher for 28 years, teaching game design and development as well as other courses related to creative uses of technology. Steve enjoys spending time with family and friends. His hobbies include video games, biking, snorkeling, hiking and live music.

Gavyn is a Senior Pipeline Technical Artist at Blizzard Entertainment, where he contributes to the iconic World of Warcraft. With 17 years of experience spanning the Media and Entertainment and Game industries, he specializes in optimizing content creation pipelines and artist workflows for film, TV, and games. Gavyn’s journey has taken him through renowned studios like Pixomondo, Industrial Light & Magic, and Blizzard Entertainment, where he’s built a reputation for blending technical expertise with a deep understanding of artistry.

Gavyn began his career as a generalist artist in the film industry, working on major titles while mastering the ins and outs of content creation. As technology evolved, he noticed a growing gap between artists and the technical tools they relied on—tools that often hindered creativity instead of enabling it. This inspired him to shift his focus to pipeline and tools development. 

For over 11 years, Gavyn has been designing scalable tools and efficient workflows that empower artists to do what they love: create. By combining his artistic background with technical innovation, he’s championed solutions that let creativity take center stage without compromising on efficiency.

Steve Stacy is has been a Principal Animator at Cryptic Studios and has even worked for Atari Games, back in the day when he used to ride his brontosaurus to work.

He has developed games such as: City of Heros, Champions Online, Star Trek Online and Neverwinter Online.

He loves to work in the fast-paced, collaborative, scrappy, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants environment that is game development and can’t wait to see what everyone’s cooking up!

Thomas Q Brady is a design technologist at MDC, formerly at Take Two Games. He works on the Applied Artificial Intelligence team, building automated tools for designers, developers, writers, and producers.  

In previous roles, he's been a front-end engineer—building UIs and working on reusable component libraries and design language systems at places like Visa, frog design, and the retail chain H-E-B. He has also been a product designer—designing interfaces for videoconferencing software and hardware at Polycom. He led a central design team that consulted with hardware and software startups at the incubator Carnegie Technologies and authored the O'Reilly Guide to Ember.js. 

When he's not at work, you'll most likely find Thomas hanging out with his wife, teenage  son and daughter, probably watching a movie or an episode of Community/The Office—unless he's sneaked off somewhere to do some reading. Usually, it's something about physics, philosophy, anthropology, or quite possibly comic books.