The NYU Game Center is proud to announce the first Barlovento Scholarship recipient, Temitope Olujobi (Temi) will be graduating later this spring. The Barlovento Scholarship for Women in Games, started in 2016, is a full-tuition scholarship awarded to an incoming MFA. This scholarship is awarded to encourage and support talented, intelligent, and driven women pursuing a career in game design and development.
Temi applied to the NYU Game Center with a Bachelors of Architecture (B.Arch) from Syracuse University, while working full-time as the Creative Director of Virtual Reality Visualization for Selldorf Architects. Her creative portfolio submission for the program was an impressive curation of 3D digital art pieces coupled with thoughtful design statements.
One of Temi's Portfolio Pieces - Biological Waste System
Olujobi first became interested in game design through making Second Life mods and participating in the online communities related to the game. Since then, she has become a specialist in 3D digital art and visualization with a focus on architecture and environment design. As a designer her interests are around reclaiming black stories by black creators, through experimental games.
“Ultimately, my desire is not only for players to learn about and visualize the stories of Black lives but also to speculate on their own lived realities and storytelling agency through recreation and the digital environment,” - Temi Olujobi
While at the NYU Game Center, Olujobi has worked on numerous projects, many relating to healing and storytelling. While completing an independent study with Mattie Brice, she worked on At the Edge of Healing: Environmental Storytelling and Restorative Justice. Created in partnership with the Restorative Practice NYC, At The Edge of Healing is a short experimental environment storytelling game that uses the virtual environment to simulate the practice of Restorative Justice in ways that illustrate the experience of the participants and the functions of the spaces that Restorative Justice can take place in.
Another project, Placeless, is an interactive virtual reality experience and therapy service meant to allow players and practicing therapists to enter a personally crafted virtual space for cognitive therapy. In Placeless players will participate in game based therapy sessions in a personally tailored virtual world.
Temi's Edge of Healing - An Independent Study with Mattie Brice
Temi is set to graduate from the NYU Game Center with an MFA in Game Design in Spring 2019. To see more of her work visit her website.