Brenda Laurel

In 2015 Laurel won the Trailblazer award at the IndieCade festival.

She was founder and chair of the Graduate Design Program at California College of the Arts (2006–2012). as well as the Media Design graduate program at Art Center College of Design (2000–2006). She has worked for Atari, co-founded the game development studio Purple Moon, and served as an interaction design consultant for multiple companies including Sony Pictures, Apple, and Citibank. As of 2021, her current work focuses on STE(A)M learning, and the application of augmented reality within it.

In 1996, Laurel founded Purple Moon, a software company focused on creating games aimed at young girls between the ages of 8 and 14. Laurel's vision was to create games for girls that had a greater focus on real life decision-making rather than appearances and materiality. The company was an experiment in turning research on girl's gaming preferences into marketable video games. The firm produced games designed around storytelling, open-ended exploration, and rehearsing realistic scenarios from one's day-to-day life, as opposed to competitive games featuring scores and timed segments. The company produced ten games primarily divided into two series: "Rockett", which focused around a young girl's daily interactions, and the more meditative "Secret Path" series. Purple Moon was eventually acquired by Mattel in 1999, but was later closed.

In Laurel's work regarding interface design, she is well known for her support of the theory of interactivity, the "degree to which users of a medium can influence the form or content of the mediated environment." Virtual reality, according to Laurel, is less characterized by its imaginary or unreal elements than by its multisensory representation of objects, be they real or imaginary. While discussions around virtual reality tended to center on visual representations, audio and kinesthesia are two potent sources of sensory input that virtual reality devices attempt to tap into. Laurel's 1994 Placeholder installation at Banff Center for the Arts—a collaboration with Rachel Strickland—explored these multisensory possibilities. Placeholder was the first VR project to separate gaze from direction of movement, allow for two hands to participate, support two player games, and use imagery from natural landscape. The installation allowed multiple people to construct a narrative by attaching movement trackers to its subjects' bodies while letting them navigate a virtual environment by doing common physical acts with special results, such as flapping one's arms to fly.

In 1989, Laurel and Scott Fisher founded Telepresence Research, a company focusing in first-person media, virtual reality, and remote presence research and development.

Laurel's first games were for the CyberVision platform, where she worked as a designer, programmer, and manager of educational product design from 1976–1979. She then moved to Atari as a software specialist, later becoming manager of the Home Computer Division for Software Strategy and Marketing, where she worked from 1980–1983. After finishing her Ph.D., Laurel worked for Activision from 1985–1987. In the late 1980s and early 1990s she worked as a creative consultant on a number of LucasArts Entertainment games, and Chris Crawford's Balance of the Planet. During this time Laurel also co-founded Telepresence Research, Inc., and became a research staff member at the Interval Research Corporation where she worked on research investigating the relationship between gender and technology.

Brenda Laurel (born 1950) is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", a public speaker, and an academic.

Brenda Kay Laurel was born on November 20, 1950 in Columbus, Ohio. She received her Bachelor of Arts from DePauw University, and her Masters of Fine Arts as well as her Ph.D. from Ohio State University. Her Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1986, titled "Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System", and would form the basis of her 1993 book "Computers as Theater".