Michelle Hinn is an instructor in the department of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Illinois (http://www.lis.uiuc.edu), where she teaches game design courses, and is the academic advisor for the Women in Math, Science, and Engineering living/learning community at the university. She was recently named one of Next Generation Magazine's 100 Most Influential Women in Gaming based on her work as chair of the IGDA Game Accessibility Special Interest Group(http://www.igda.org/accessibility) and works closely with GameAccessibility.com(http://www.gameaccessibility.com). Michelle is also the head of the game division of a shareware/donationware company, DonationCoder.com(http://www.donationcoder.com). She has a B.A. in Music Performance, a B.S. in Psychology, a M.A. in Multimedia Design from Virginia Tech, and is completing her PhD in Game Accessibility at the University of Illinois.

Michelle Hinn has worked at Microsoft Game Studios where she focused on piloting usability tests for Xbox multiplayer games. Additionally, she has worked for Computer Sciences Corporation, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the University of Nevada at Reno. She is the co-editor of the 2001 book Visions of Quality: How Evaluators Define, Understand, and Represent Program Quality and is working with the Game Accessibility SIG on a book on Game Accessibility. She is on the editorial board of ACM's Computers in Entertainment magazine. Michelle has also authored several award-winning papers on the topic of universalaccessibility from organizations such as the American Evaluators Association and the International Visual Literacy Association and was one of the three 2006 recipients of the IGDA's Most Valuable Player Award.