Jermaine Anthony Richards is a critical scholar of computational, digital, and interactive media, with interests in video games, virtual worlds, and immersive environments. His work examines the media 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 – under Robeson Taj Frazier (chair), Henry Jenkins, Cristina Visperas, TreaAndrea Russworm, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson – investigates the relationship between media institutions and the construction of civic categories. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Renaissance Reader and the International Journal of Communication. His focus on media industries, affective economies, and social problems draws on nearly two decades of professional experience across creative advertising and cause marketing, media production, branded entertainment, and digital development policy. He entered advertising as a teenager through a specialized New York City high school founded in a 2008 partnership with creative shops across Interpublic Group, Omnicom Group, WPP, and Publicis Groupe, where he began his early career in media strategy, design, planning, and production at McCann and Deutsch before joining Wieden+Kennedy as a creative 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 and MassArt, 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 (Cambodia, Viet Nam, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar) 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 public writing on media industries and policy has appeared in Ad Age and Fair Observer.

Richards is a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow 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. 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, where he studied under Jamaican-born visual artist, curator, and art historian Margaret Rose Vendryes.