Hi there. My name is Jermaine Anthony Richards. I am an interdisciplinary scholar, creative producer, and relational artist working across video, games, virtual worlds, and mixed-media installations. I am also a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, with a dual affiliation with the School of Cinematic Arts’ Interactive Media and Games Division, where I serve as Senior Producer and Research Manager in the Radical Play Lab. I am completing my dissertation on a USC Graduate School Dean’s Endowed Dissertation Fellowship.
I study institutional power in communication and media industries. Following new institutional economics, I distinguish between institutions and organizations: “institution” refers to rules, standards, or established practices; “power” refers to the ability to create institutions. My work probes how institutional power flows through organizations, and how experimental, computational, and interactive media objects, environments, and practices, such as video games and gaming, as well as virtual worlds and worlding, reinscribe cultural and political conventions into “industries.”
My dissertation is theoretically grounded in Black studies and situated in critical-cultural communication and media studies, with an inflection from science and technology studies (STS). It examines how organizations institutionalize and industrialize civic categories, and how those categories shape which problems are worthy of engagement, investment, and interaction. The project rests on a relational database I engineered, which serves as its archive and helps direct the inquiry. Robeson Taj Frazier chairs my dissertation committee; other members include Henry Jenkins, Cristina Mejia Visperas, TreaAndrea Russworm (USC School of Cinematic Arts: Interactive Media and Games Division), and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (Duke University, Program in Literature).
The rest of this page contextualizes how I came to this work at the intersection of institutional power, interactive media, and the cultural politics of intervention.
My scholarship also draws on nearly two decades of professional experience spanning creative advertising, media production, and international technology and development policy. I began working on Madison Avenue at age thirteen through a specialized New York City high school founded in partnership with advertising agencies and their holding companies (Interpublic, Omnicom, WPP, and Publicis). I went on to work in strategy, planning, and production at McCann and Deutsch for nearly a decade before joining Wieden+Kennedy as a creative producer. There, among other projects, I was the credited producer of Hair Nah, a viral browser game about a Black woman traveling while people try to touch her hair. The browser game and its subsequent adaptations have been exhibited at museums worldwide.
My artistic and professional work in virtual, simulated, and synthetic environments, however, began much earlier. In Second Life, I founded a company devoted to production, curation, and publishing, which I led as its principal for nearly a decade alongside my studies. Most notably, I directed a first-of-its-kind, feature-length film adaptation of a ballet staged virtually in Second Life. The ballet was based on John Milton’s seventeenth-century theological epic Paradise Lost, which retells the biblical account of the Fall of Man in Genesis. The film was well received. One critic praised its cinematography and editing, calling it “a work of remarkable skill and passion” and suggesting it might represent “a new benchmark for Second Life machinima.”
These experiences deepened my interest in how communication, computation, and organization influence the ways people approach political, philosophical, and theological questions. After graduate study at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), I served as a Summer Associate at New America, a Washington, DC-based think tank, where I worked on public finance, sustainable development, and digital public infrastructure. I then became a Fellow in the organization’s Digital Impact and Governance Initiative.
As a Fellow, I led research and co-authored a landscape analysis of digital transformation and governance. I also led the development of the Catalog of Digital Solutions in the Lower Mekong Region, which addressed an information gap on how digital solutions respond to social, economic, and sustainability challenges across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The study examined the emerging field of digital public infrastructure while attending to surveillance, censorship, and threats to fundamental freedoms, including internet freedom, that hinder people-centered development in the region. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade funded the research. I later drew on its findings in a Fair Observer essay on digital disaster infrastructure in Jamaica.
My scholarly writing includes contributions to the International Journal of Communication and The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé and Black Queer Popular Culture, edited by Kinitra Brooks (Michigan State) and Nicholas Jones (Yale). I regularly present at conferences of the American Studies Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the International Communication Association.
I hold degrees and certificates in science and technology studies, communication, global communication, global media, communications technology, and studio art from the London School of Economics and Political Science, USC Annenberg, and York College of The City University of New York (CUNY).