About Me

I direct conferences and festivals, create participatory mixed reality performances, and coach people who want to engage seriously with who they are becoming. This is how I got here.

I grew up in a small village divided by a train line. Two thousand people, two Schützenvereine, two community festivals – as if the tracks were sometimes enough reason to project a whole other world onto the people living fifty metres away. I watched that as a kid and couldn’t quite understand it. Why don’t people find their way to each other more easily? Why do arbitrary lines become the reason we stop seeing the person on the other side?

That question has followed me ever since. It’s probably why I ended up doing what I do.

Finding my people

Before the worldwide web, before social media, before any of it — there were BBS systems and the demoscene. A community of programmers, musicians, and visual artists making real-time digital art for no reason other than the love of it. Brilliant people, many of them outsiders in their everyday lives, who had found each other across geography and background through a shared obsession with pushing technology to its limits.

I was one of them. Have been for more than thirty years.

The demoscene taught me something I’ve carried ever since: that the most interesting things emerge at the edges of what’s possible, and that competition and community don’t exclude each other — they can be the same thing. When I first stepped into the games industry, I felt immediately at home. I knew this world. I knew these people. I knew the particular alchemy of brilliance, neurodiversity, passion, and rivalry that makes creative communities like this one so alive.

The work of serendipity

I’ve spent most of my working life creating conditions for things to happen — conferences where a conversation between strangers sparks something neither expected, performances where a VR headset and a dancer’s body open up a space that didn’t exist before, coaching sessions where someone goes quiet because they’ve just heard themselves say something true.

What Priya Parker calls the art of gathering. What I think of as the work of serendipity.

The real power of any festival or conference is never the programme — it’s the unknown unknowns. Two people standing together, a third gets introduced, and from there things happen. A fourth, a fifth. Conversations that have butterfly effects five or ten years later that nobody could have predicted in the room. My job is to create the conditions where that becomes possible.

I’ve been doing that in the games industry since 2009 — from Quo Vadis and Respawn – Gathering of Game Developers to Ludicious Zürich, Reboot Develop, and devcom. Today I direct gamescom congress through my program agency curatomic.

Art as connection

Since 2021, I’ve been co-directing VR Dance Club with Anna-Carolin Weber — a performance practice that asks what happens when dance and virtual reality share a stage. It’s become the centre of my artistic life.

The work explores asymmetric interaction — what happens when two people share an experience but perceive it completely differently. The dancer sees one world. The audience member sees another. And in that gap between perspectives, something new becomes possible. It’s the same question I’ve been asking since the village. Just expressed differently.

Coaching as the long thread

The coaching work didn’t begin with a certification. It began in 2011 — a turning point when I realised that working in an industry I loved wasn’t enough if it came at the expense of everything else. That experience turned into years of informal mentoring and support, with peers, with communities, with people navigating the same pressures I recognised from the inside.

In 2022 I formalised it: certified systemic coaching through the INEKO Institut at the University of Cologne, grounded in the person-centred approach of Carl Rogers. What I discovered was that the approach I’d been trained in felt completely natural — because it starts from the same place I’ve always started. Respect for the person in front of you. The belief that everyone already has the resources and solutions within them. The work is about opening avenues, not providing answers.

I work with people in digital and games who want to engage seriously with who they are becoming — whether they’re leading organisations, building something new, or finding their footing.

What drives me

I believe connection is possible — between people who seem to have nothing in common, between disciplines that appear to have nothing to say to each other, between who someone is today and who they are becoming.

That belief is what draws me to the stage, the studio, and the coaching room alike.

Curious to go deeper? The Bio page has the full professional background. Or explore Services, Artistic Work, or just get in touch.