Hi there. I'm Jermaine Anthony Richards, a critical scholar, creative producer, and relational artist. I study institutional power through communication and media across corporate, nonprofit, and public organizations. My work specifically explores who sets the rules and conventions governing cultural, media, and creative industries—and how that power moves through communication technologies, organizations, and everyday practices. I pursue these questions through video games, virtual worlds, and other interactive media, drawing on nearly two decades of experience in creative advertising, marketing, media production, branded entertainment, artistic practice, and international policy.

I'm a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, in the political economy of global communication track. At USC's School of Cinematic Arts, I serve as Senior Producer and Research Manager at the Radical Play Lab in the Interactive Media and Games Division.

In my research, I distinguish institutions—rules, standards, and established practices—from organizations such as companies, agencies, and studios. I define institutional power as the ability to create institutions and examine communication as a mechanism through which that capacity is exercised.

My dissertation asks how organizations institutionalize and industrialize civic categories—and how those categories, once established, come to determine which social problems are considered worthy of investment and interaction. The project is grounded in Black studies, situated within critical-cultural communication and media studies, and inflected by science and technology studies. I engineered its archive as a relational database that helps structure and guide the inquiry.

I'm completing the dissertation with support from a USC Graduate School Dean's Endowed Dissertation Fellowship and a wonderful committee chaired by Robeson Taj Frazier. Its other members are Henry Jenkins, Cristina Mejia Visperas, TreaAndrea Russworm, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (Duke Literature).

My entry into Madison Avenue came at thirteen, through a New York City high school founded in partnership with advertising agencies and their holding companies: Interpublic, Omnicom, WPP, and Publicis. I went on to spend nearly a decade in strategy, planning, and production at McCann and Deutsch before joining Wieden+Kennedy as a creative producer. There, I was the credited producer of the original browser version of Hair Nah, a viral game about a Black woman who travels while people try to touch her hair. The game and subsequent adaptations have been exhibited in museums and taught around the world.

I also founded and led a production company in Second Life, working in synthetic environments for nearly a decade. Of that period, I'm proudest of directing the feature-length Paradise Lost in Second Life: The Movie (2015). The film adapts Basilique Performing Arts Company's virtual dance-theater production, staged under Canary Beck's direction and based on John Milton's seventeenth-century theological epic retelling the Fall of Man. A contemporary review praised its cinematography and editing, calling it “a work of remarkable skill and passion” and suggesting that it might set a new benchmark for Second Life machinima.

That experience left me with a question I couldn't put down: how do communication and organization shape the ways people approach critical-cultural, philosophical, and theological questions? I carried that question into graduate study at the London School of Economics and, later, to New America, a Washington, DC think tank. There, I began as a Summer Associate focusing on public finance, sustainable development, and digital public infrastructure before becoming a Fellow in the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative.

As a Fellow, I directed research and coauthored a landscape analysis of digital transformation and governance while leading development of the Catalog of Digital Solutions in the Lower Mekong Region. Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade funded the study. The catalog addressed an information gap: the absence of a clear picture of how digital solutions were responding to social, economic, and sustainability challenges across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. We approached digital public infrastructure as an emerging field, with particular attention to how surveillance, censorship, and threats to fundamental freedoms, including internet freedom, obstruct people-centered development. I later drew on those findings in a Fair Observer essay on digital disaster infrastructure in Jamaica.

My training includes degrees and certificates from the London School of Economics and Political Science, USC Annenberg, and York College of the City University of New York. These studies span science and technology studies, communication and global media, communications technology, and studio art.

My writing has appeared in the International Journal of Communication; The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé and Black Queer Popular Culture, edited by Kinitra Brooks of Michigan State and Nicholas Jones of Yale; and Sine Qua Non: A Journal of Creative Writing. I regularly present at conferences of the American Studies Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the International Communication Association. If you're there, please come say hello.