Jermaine Anthony Richards is a scholar of computational media systems, institutions, and industries. His work focuses on how cultural, political, and economic power moves through digital, interactive, and virtual media, especially games. He is also a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project, and a Dean's Endowed Dissertation Fellow of the USC Graduate School.
Working across communication and media studies, Black studies, and political economy, Richards' dissertation complicates media institutions' and industries' roles and methods in constructing and maintaining social and political categories organizing American civic life. The project rests on a relational database he designed and built. He is advised by and writes under Robeson Taj Frazier (dissertation chair), Henry Jenkins, Cristina Visperas, TreaAndrea Russworm, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. He has lectured in writing-intensive and practice-based courses on interpreting popular culture and designing media for social change.
Richards' focus on communication and media industries 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 partnership with agencies across Interpublic, Omnicom, WPP, and Publicis. He began his career in media strategy, planning, and production on Madison Avenue at McCann and Deutsch before joining Wieden+Kennedy as a creative producer. At Wieden+Kennedy, he led the end-to-end technical and artistic 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 and featured in The New York Times and the foreign press, and in books and journals, including 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 across five Lower Mekong countries and their emerging-market contexts, funded by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. His scholarly writing appears in the International Journal of Communication and in an edited collection on media industrial production. His public writing on media industries and policy appears in Ad Age and Fair Observer.
At USC, Richards is affiliated with the School of Cinematic Arts' Interactive Media & Games Division, where he serves as Senior Producer and Research Manager for the Radical Play Lab. He holds graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and USC Annenberg, and a BS from York College of the City University of New York, where 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.
Read more about his work at jermainerichards.com.