Stephanie Riggs

Stephanie Riggs works at the intersection of storytelling and emerging technology, developing projects across theatre, themed entertainment, film, immersive media, and experiential environments for more than 25 years. Riggs began her career as a Disney Imagineer and later served as experiential creative director for Refinery29/Vice Media.

Her work has included augmented and virtual reality experiences, immersive installations, and spatial narrative environments developed with creative studios, technology labs, and research institutions. Her projects and research collaborations have involved organisations such as Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, NYU’s Future Reality Lab, and Yale, where she co-founded the Blended Reality Lab.

Riggs speaks internationally at conferences and industry gatherings including SXSW and SIGGRAPH, and regularly guest lectures at institutions such as Harvard, Yale and USC.

“As a maker, her credits trace the medium’s own timeline. She was creating interactive virtual worlds in the mid-1990s and premiered early VR work at SIGGRAPH in 1998, long before immersive technology reached consumers. She released Banshee Chapter: Oculus Rift Edition, the first feature film ever released on the Oculus, and in 2015 filmed President Obama’s historic Nairobi speech in 360 – making him the first US president recorded in virtual reality,” said one person who nominated Riggs.

“Stephanie Riggs both pushed the technical boundaries of immersive media and articulated the ideas that help everyone else make sense of it. In a field that often races ahead of its own understanding, she is one of the rare figures advancing the craft and the theory at once – and that dual influence is precisely what shapes where immersive storytelling goes next.”