Elizabeth LaPensée, Ph.D. is Narrative Director at Twin Suns. She is an award-winning designer, writer, and artist of games and comics who was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018 and inducted into the Global Women in Games Hall of Fame in 2020. She is Irish, Anishinaabe, and Métis, living in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.
In games, her roles vary. She was the designer and artist of Thunderbird Strike, a lightning-searing side-scroller game which won Best Digital Media at imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival 2017. Most recently, she directed and designed When Rivers Were Trails, an adventure game about land allotment in the 1890s which won the Adaptation Award at IndieCade 2019.
In comics, she often writes and occasionally illustrates. She wrote the graphic novel Rabbit Chase and comics for MOONSHOT: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volume 1 and MOONSHOT: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volume 2. She was editor of the comic collection A Howl: An Indigenous Anthology of Wolves, Werewolves, and Rougarou and co-editor of MOONSHOT: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volume 3, Deer Woman: An Anthology, and more.
Along with creating curriculum for the award-winning Skins Video Game Workshops, she has led game development workshops since 2006 with Indigenous partners such as the The Boys & Girls Club of Bay Mills, Joseph K. Lumsden Bahweting Anishnabe PSA, the Voyageurs Expeditionary School, the Indigenous Youth Empowerment Program, Native Girls Code, and the Aboriginal Youth Science Exchange Camp at Algoma University. Her contributions were recognized with the Serious Games Community Leadership Award in 2017.