Dr Owen Brierley
- Kingston School of Art
- Department of Creative Industries
- School of Creative and Cultural Industries
- Design, Arts and Creative Practice
Course Leader & Senior Lecturer
About
Owen Brierley is a Course Leader and Senior Lecturer at Kingston School of Art, working where digital technology, game engines, and the performing arts meet. He holds a PhD in Computational Media Design from the University of Calgary, where his thesis used graph databases to improve how non-player characters behave and "act" in games, a toolkit with applications reaching across animation, game development, bioinformatics, and game studies. Since joining Kingston in 2023 he has led the Creative Industries undergraduate course, co-designed the School's newly launched Game Creation course, and become first supervisor to three doctoral students.
His research treats game engines as serious instruments for scholarly inquiry rather than just entertainment. He is developing Q-Player, a strand growing out of his doctoral work, supported through two successful Seedcorn funding cycles. His published work includes a CHI 2021 study of how players return to long-term single-player games, a MobileHCI 2022 protocol for improving performance in XR and games, a co-design study of audio interactions between autonomous vehicles and hearing-enhanced pedestrians, and the LeukemiaSIM project, which brought game-design thinking to a VR biology simulation. He is guest editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media on "Digital Empathy," and writes for wider audiences in The Conversation, on subjects from the rise of organised scientific fraud to why players choose to spend their free time simulating work.
Before Kingston, Brierley spent eleven years (2008–2019) as executive director of the Edmonton Digital Arts College, which he grew from a single course with fewer than 20 students into four undergraduate diploma programmes serving more than 120 students a year, built around small classes and a research-led curriculum shaped to each learner. He has also held leadership roles with Digital Alberta and the Canadian Communications Foundation.
Brierley is a practising artist and designer as well as a researcher, collaborating across theatre, dance, music, and visual arts, with work shown at venues including the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Citadel Theatre. Most recently he served as Virtual Scenographer on The Nether, a mixed-reality theatre production developed with the University of Waterloo. His teaching centres on risk-taking, dignity, and inclusion, creating spaces where students can experiment, grow, and find their own creative voice.
Qualifications
- PhD - Computational Media Design
- Multimedia Production Diploma
- Theatre Arts Diploma