Nova Villanueva is a professor of game design at Pratt Institute, New York, USA. She has taught game development for more than five years at Pratt, Parsons, and New York’s College of Technology, and is an independent game developer working on The Mills game. Nova is a game designer and artist who has previously worked as a 3D artist for Animatic Media, on the Webby award-winning Mafia Wars game developed by Zynga, and was a published artist featured in the Photoshop Creative magazine. She has an MFA degree in game design from the NYU Game Center in New York and a BS degree in media arts and animation from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.