Select Recognition

• 4 Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature with Pixar Animation Studio

Current CV [pdf] IMBD

Kyoung Lee Swearingen is an Associate Professor of Design at The Ohio State University. With over a decade of experience as a Technical Director of Lighting at Pixar Animation Studios and DNA Productions, Kyoung’s filmography includes Ratatouille, Wall-E, UP, Cars 2, Toy Story 3, Brave, Monsters University, Presto, La Luna, The Blue Umbrella, Mater’s Tall Tales, Partly Cloudy, Ant Bully and the Jimmy NeutronTV series which had claimed numerous awards from the Academy Awards, BAFTA, Visual Effects Society, The American Film Institute, as well as many others.

Kyoung’s collaborative project, ‘Sonder’ is an animated short, created by 144 artists, designers, and engineers from around the world. It premiered in Berlin and has claimed many international awards, and was shown in various film festival globally including the Edinburgh Short Film Festival 2018 in England, ASIFA- South 2018 in Busan, Korea, and Canberra Short Film Festival, 2018 in Australia.

Another project titled ‘Wall Mounted Level’ is a cooperative, multiplayer game that uses digital projection and physical sculpture to promote reconciliation between players through touch interactions and digital storytelling. Wall Mounted Level has been invited to show in many international conferences such as ACM SIGGRAPH, IFIP-ICEC, IEEE- GEM, and HASTAC and was awarded as best ‘Innovative Game’ and best ‘Social Impact’ game at the Montreal Independent Game Festival 2017. 

Her latest collaboration with Associate Professor Scott Swearingen, ‘The Woods’ is a mixed-reality, two-player cooperative game that addresses the perils of social isolation by promoting connections between people through play. The Woods was presented at HCI International 2021, curated by the CURRENTS New Media 2021 and exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, NM, and selected at SIGGRAPH 2021 as an Art Paper.

Her current research focuses on creating games and animation for social good using humane technology.

Publications

• Dontha Balaji, Kyoung Lee Swearingen, Scott Swearingen, Asimina Kiourti. “Wearable Sensors Based on Force-Sensitive Resistors for Touch-Based Collaborative Digital Gaming.” Sensors, vol. 22, no. 1, Jan. 2022, p.342. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22010342
• Scott Swearingen and Kyoung Lee Swearingen. “The Woods AR Game”, IFIP- ICEC, International Conference on Entertainment Computing 2021, November 1-5, 2021, Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2021 (accepted and pending publication) 45% effort [peer reviewed]
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen, Scott Swearingen, Fede Camara Halac, Matthew Hall, and Sruthi Ammannagari. “The Woods: A Mixed-Reality Two-Player Cooperative Game”, Art Papers, SIGGRAPH 2021, Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (PACMCGIT) Special issue on SIGGRAPH 2021 Art Papers and ACM Digital Library, August 9-13, 2021.
• Scott Swearingen and Kyoung Lee Swearingen. “The Woods: A Mixed-Reality Multiplayer Cooperative Game”, HCI International 2021, volume 29, LNCS 12790, ISBN 978-3-030-77413-4, July 24-29, 2021.
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. “Designing a Cooperative Mixed-Reality Game about Reconciliation”, 2018 IEEE Games, Entertainment, Media Conference (GEM), 2018, pp 1-9, DOI: 10.1109/GEM.2018.8516538
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. “Designing ‘Wall Mounted Level’ – A Cooperative Mixed-Reality Game about Reconciliation”, In: Clua E., Roque L., Lugmayr A., Tuomi P. (eds) Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2018. ICEC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11112. pp 284-288, Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99426-0_30
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. “Wall Mounted Level: A Cooperative Mixed Reality Game about Reconciliation”, SIGGRAPH ’18: ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Posters, Article No.:20, Pages 1-2, DOI: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3230744.3230771
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. “Games and Storytelling for Design Foundations”, the 34th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student, (NCBDS), Vol 34 No. 1 (2018), Sept 26, 2018, https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/ncbds/article/view/787
   

Exhibits

• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. The Woods, Monmouth University. NJ, Curated by Wobbe Koning, November 29, 2022
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. “The Woods: A Mixed-Reality Cooperative Game.” 2022 Games+Learning+Society Conference, A Well-Played Presentation, 16 Jun. 2022, University of California, Irvine, CA [peer reviewed]
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. “The Woods: A Collaborative Augmented Reality Game”, Global Digital Humanities Symposium, Michigan State University (MSU), 23 Mar. 2022, East Lansing, Michigan [peer reviewed]
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. The Woods, Center for Contemporary Arts, Curated by Mariannah Amster and Frank Ragano from CURRENTS New Media, Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 18-24, 2021
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. Wall Mounted Level, ‘East | West Gallery’, Curated by Danielle Avram, North Texas Digital Fabrication Symposium, Texas Women’s University, Denton, TX, April 20-21, 2018
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. “Wall Mounted Level v.3”, Game, CUNY Games Conference 4.0, City University of New York, New York City, NY, January 22, 2018  
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. “Wall Mounted Level v.2”, Game, MEGA-MTL Montreal Expo Gaming Arcade, Montreal Independent Games Festival, November 18-19, 2017
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. “Wall Mounted Level v.1”, Game, HASTAC 2017, Orlando, FL, November 2-4, 2017
• Kyoung Lee Swearingen and Scott Swearingen. “Beacon”, Video and Sculpture. Research Through Making. Urban Arts Space, Columbus, Ohio. August 23 – September 24, 2016.