About Niki Selken

Niki Selken 👩🏻‍💻is an artist, technologist and educator. Her work focuses around  storytelling, games and interaction design. She is the Creative Development Lead at in the Gray Area where she manages the artist incubator and creative code education programs. She founded the Emoji Foundation, created the Emoji Dictionary, and VR game EmojiFlower VR. Niki attributes her intuitive understanding of the translation and meaning of Emoji to her extensive Japanese stationery collection and study of Japanese Butoh and Noh theater. In 2014 she won New York NASA Space Apps  and placed as a global finalist for wearable tech project, Senti8. Her game, Find Maria Rivera was exhibited and selected as an Award Finalist at Indiecade 2015. In 2016 she was selected as a Kill Screen game design scholar andParsons E-Lab fellow for her Augmented Reality platform, Wayscape. Niki’s design and Emoji work has been featured by Yahoo Tech, Adafruit, Buzzfeed and Make Magazine among others.