Jermaine Anthony Richards is a critical-cultural scholar of computational media, media institutions, and media industries; he is also a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Dean's Endowed Dissertation Fellow of the USC Graduate School. Richards studies how institutional stakeholders use digital, interactive, and virtual media to broker political and economic power. He approaches these questions through games.
Working across communication and media studies, Black studies, and political economy, Richards’s dissertation examines how media institutions construct and maintain civic categories that shape which social problems are treated as worthy of intervention in American public life. The project rests on a database he designed, built, and populated. His dissertation committee is chaired by Robeson Taj Frazier and includes Henry Jenkins, Cristina Visperas, TreaAndrea Russworm, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. At USC, Richards is affiliated with the School of Cinematic Arts' Interactive Media & Games Division, where he is a Senior Producer and Research Manager. He also lectures in writing-intensive and practice-based courses on interpreting popular culture and designing media for social change.
Richards’s scholarship on communication and media industries draws on nearly two decades of professional experience across creative advertising and cause marketing, branded entertainment and media production, and digital development policy. He began working on Madison Avenue at age thirteen through a specialized New York City high school founded in partnership with agencies within Interpublic, Omnicom, WPP, and Publicis. He went on to work in media strategy, planning, and production for nearly a decade at McCann and Deutsch before joining Wieden+Kennedy as a creative producer. Outside agency life, he made films and custom content in The Sims. In the Second Life virtual world, he founded, managed, and served as creative director of a first-of-its-kind, revenue-generating machinima fashion production company and creative services agency.
At Wieden+Kennedy, Richards led production and co-designed the user interface and experience for 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 permanently accessioned by The Strong National Museum of Play. It is taught globally, featured in The New York Times, and examined in books and journals, including a special issue of American Literature.
As a Fellow at New America's Digital Impact and Governance Initiative, Richards led research for and co-authored a landscape analysis of digital transformation and governance. He also led development of the Catalog of Digital Solutions in the Lower Mekong Region, curated to fill an information gap on the use of digital solutions to address 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 broader human rights concerns—including fundamental freedoms and internet freedom—that present significant barriers to people-centered development in the region. The research was funded by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
His scholarly writing appears in the International Journal of Communication and The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé and Black Queer Popular Culture. His public writing on advertising and policy appears in Ad Age and Fair Observer.
Richards holds graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science and USC Annenberg, and a BS from York College of the City University of New York. At York, he studied communications technology, digital information systems, and studio art, the latter under the mentorship of Jamaican-born visual artist, curator, and art historian Margaret Rose Vendryes.