Visiting Assistant Professor • dmsalles@syr.edu

Education
BA SUNY Stony Brook, 1989
MFA, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, 1991
Studied 3D animation at FIT, New York, 1994, and
Writing for Multimedia, San Francisco State University, 1998

Biography
Moved to New York City as a child when her parents escaped Brazil's military dictatorship in 1970. Was in the last graduating class in the High School of Music and Art in Harlem. Was a Senior Artist at the American Museum of Natural History, specializing in illustrations of human evolution.

Moved to Central Florida to join the Madden Football development team and assisted in making the transition of Madden to full 3D gameplay.

Created art and animation for several game titles while working at Konami in the San Franciaco Bay Area, including Frogger's Great Quest.

In 2000, moved to New Orleans where she helped develop motion capture facilities at the NIMS film studio. While in Louisiana, she was enthralled by the open and accepting culture, the impromptu yet elaborate festivities and the individual style of its citizens, all of which had roots in a long tradition. This informed her new interest in public art. She was one of many artists selected by the New Orleans African American Museum to participate in a largescale public installation. For that project she painted a mural in the Treme neighborhood depicting what the same location might have looked like in the 19th century. She also created several large ceramic murals for the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial plaza in Shreveport. She might have stayed in New Orleans had it not been for the natural disaster of Katrina and the man-made disasters that followed.

After fleeing the hurricane and living in an evacuee camp for three weeks, she returned to game development. She created new interfaces for an emulator version of Road Rash, and made art and animations for the New York Times Crosswords and for the Nintendo DS, versions of Medal of Honor: Vanguard and Guitar Heroes 3.

Research and Teaching Interests
Character animation, short animation, visual storytelling, interactive fiction, game development, history of interactive media.

I am currently working on short animations whose subjects have limited lives, circumscribed by violence. I wish to examine violence as a deliberate means of control in interpersonal relationships. I seek to examine how the damage survivors undergo changes them, without sentimentalizing.

Favorite Music
Bossa Nova, Blues, Swamp rock, Brass Bands.