Kellee Santiago

Kellee Santiago
Kellee Santiago at the Game Developers Conference in 2010
Born	Caracas, Venezuela
Residence	Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Game designer, producer
Known for	thatgamecompany
Notable work	Cloud, Flow, Flower, Journey
Spouse(s)	Mike Stein
Website	http://www.kelleesantiago.com/

External video

The Art of Video Games: Interview with Kellee Santiago, Jenova Chen, and Robin Hunicke, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Kellee Santiago is a Venezuelan-American video game designer and producer. She is the co-founder and former president of thatgamecompany. Santiago was born in Caracas, Venezuela and was raised in Richmond, Virginia, where she played video games from a young age and was encouraged by her software engineer father to experiment with computers. While attending New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, she became active in experimental theater, and intended to pursue it after earning a master's degree in the Interactive Media Program of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. While there, however, she became involved in video game design, and produced Cloud, a game developed by Jenova Chen and a student team. Its success sparked her and Chen to found thatgamecompany upon graduating, and she became the president.

Santiago produced the studio's first two games, Flow and Flower, moving more into her president role during the development of the company's latest game, Journey. In addition to her work at thatgamecompany, Santiago is one of the backers of the Indie Fund, a group which invests in the development of independent video games, and is a TED fellow. She married fellow University of Southern California graduate Mike Stein in 2010. After the release of Journey in 2012, Santiago left the company; as of 2015, in addition to serving on several advisory boards, she works for Google Play Games.