Hayley/Harlin Steele (they/she/ze/he) is BasedMIP's Lead Narratologist and is presently directing the development of the BasedMIP prototype as part of their dissertation work. Steele has been a Project Director at ModLab, an Emerging Media Laboratory at UC Davis since 2019, and an Assistant with the Feminist Research Institute since 2024. They have taught courses in writing and Science and Technology Studies (STS) at UC Davis, including STS 110: "Data, Computing, and Law."
From 2023-24, she became a faculty member of the English Department at Western Washington University, where they taught courses in literature and creative writing. Ze holds an MFA in Nonfiction writing from Portland State University. He is presently a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, with a Designated Emphasis (DE) in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Performance and Practice.
Steele's media art includes their work as a co-director of the transmedia pieces Destination Wedding 2070 (2019), a dark comedy set in the year 2070 in which climate change is the ultimate wedding crasher, and Thermopiles in Love (2016), a 5-gender dating game lampooning gender bio-essentialism centering the most resilient microorganisms on the planet.
Steele published the first paper to articulate "learning through gamemaking" as a generalizable teaching method in 2023. Their invited chapter "Larp as Medium, Larp as Message: Some Notes on Managing a Diegetic Commons" is slated for publication in Narrative Play: Interactivity, Art, and Digital Storytelling, ed. Philip A. Klobucar, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2025.
In 2022, Steele organized several teams to attend Scenarios Forum, a leading gathering for climate data scientists, work that ultimately had an impact on leading climate modeling regimes. Steele is presently serving as a mentor to interns from Davis Data Driven Change (D3C), a student-led data justice organization.
Follow Harlin/Hayley Steele on Academia.edu
Image caption: Harlin/Hayley Steele inside Adrian Piper's art piece "Art for the Art World Surface Pattern" (1976) at the SF MOMA.