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Heather Kuzmich, a top-five finalist from Cycle 9 of America's Next Top Model, will soon be modeling something other than clothes: video game characters.
Kuzmich, who overcame the social hurdles of Asperger's Syndrome (a mild form of Autism) to appear on the show, has enrolled in a video game art design program at the Illinois Institute of Art.
Interviewed on the blog of Voodoo PC founder, Rahul Sood, Kuzmich said, "To be honest, I always wanted to do something that included art and creating stuff with my hands. At first I wanted to get into costume design, but that soon changed to game design, especially since I frigging love games and love doing weird designs for characters."
Kuzmich is a gaming fangirl, but she's decidedly platform agnostic. She plays on PS3, Wii, DS and PC, citing the Resident Evil series, Final Fantasy VII, Prince of Persia and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic as some of her all-time faves. In other words: she's a model gamer.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From Joystiq.com:
