Sara Thacher is an American game and experience designer. She is one of the founders of the

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

-based immersive experience

The Jejune Institute The Jejune Institute was an alternate reality game, public art installation and immersive experience that ran in San Francisco, California from 2008 to 10 April 2011. It was created by Jeff Hull, Sara Thacher, and Uriah Findley as Nonchalance, a ...

and works as a creative director and senior R&D Imagineer at

Walt Disney Imagineering Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, Inc., commonly referred to as Imagineering, is the research and development arm of The Walt Disney Company, responsible for the creation, design, and construction of Disney theme parks and attra ...

, including creative leadership on the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser two-day immersive

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

experience.

Education

Thacher studied glass at the

Rhode Island School of Design The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD , pronounced "Riz-D") is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase the ...

and earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Social Practice at the

California College of the Arts California College of the Arts (CCA) is a private art school in San Francisco, California. It was founded in Berkeley, California in 1907 and moved to a historic estate in Oakland, California in 1922. In 1996 it opened a second campus in Sa ...

Career

Thacher was one of the creators of the multi-chapter interactive experience

in San Francisco, with Jeff Hull and Uriah Findley. She served as a lead producer and experience designer for Nonchalance after answering a Craigslist recruiting ad. She is featured in the 2013 documentary about

, '' The Institute''. She later worked for The Go Game and was a producer and designer on ''FutureCoast'', a future forecasting game by '' World Without Oil's'' Ken Eklund that ran in February 2014. ''FutureCoast'' was funded by a grant from the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

's Polar Partnership. The game explored climate change, its effect on polar ice, and rising sea levels through a series of voicemails from the future. The game also used in-person experiences, geocached items, and social media to engage audiences. Thacher works as a senior creative director and research and development Imagineer at

. Her work includes creative leadership on the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser two-day immersive Disney experience, the

Themed Entertainment Association The Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) is an international non-profit association that represents creators, developers, designers and producers of themed entertainment. It is also noted for its THEA Awards, which were founded in 1995 and ar ...

Award-winning Haunted Mansion: Ghost Post, and

alternate reality game An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. The form is defined by inten ...

The Optimist, a game set around

Anaheim, California Anaheim ( ) is a city in northern Orange County, California, part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. As of the 2020 United States Census, the city had a population of 346,824, making it the most populous city in Orange County, the 10th-most p ...

and inside

Disneyland Disneyland is a amusement park, theme park in Anaheim, California. Opened in 1955, it was the first theme park opened by The Walt Disney Company and the only one designed and constructed under the direct supervision of Walt Disney. Disney in ...

that served as a promotional tie-in to the 2015 film ''

Tomorrowland Tomorrowland is one of the many themed lands featured at all of the Magic Kingdom styled Disney theme parks around the world owned or licensed by The Walt Disney Company. Each version of the land is different and features numerous attractions t ...

''.

References

Living people Transmediation American video game designers Women video game designers Disney people Rhode Island School of Design alumni California College of the Arts alumni {{DEFAULTSORT:Thacher, Sara Year of birth missing (living people)