Teams and Committees
Festival Coordinators
The festival coordinators are responsible for the logistics and practical details of the festival. This includes venue related matters, the festival schedule, volunteer coordination, and all festival-related activities other than the scenarios themselves.
Scenario Curation Committee
The Scenario Curation Committee handles everything related to the festival’s programming. They will be selecting scenarios for inclusion at Make a Scene and offering support and guidance to the authors of the selected scenarios.
Positive Play Committee
The positive play committee serves in an advisory role to the other teams to help us reach our stated standards for accessibility, inclusivity, and participant safety. The positive play committee, along with the onsite safety team, will be asked to resolve any matters of policy implementation should the need arise.
Onsite Safety Team
The onsite safety team is comprised of a group of volunteers that works in tandem with the positive play committee to support participants during the festival. Safety team members will be present to answer questions, address concerns, take reports, monitor our spaces, or just to talk if that’s what you need.
Social Media Coordinator
Our social media coordinator handles our Facebook page, and generally makes sure that everyone on the internet know about all the cool things we’re up to. You can reach them directly through any of our social media channels.
Technical Support
As you might imagine, our technical support personnel help us keep this website up and running.
Kitchen Coordinator
The kitchen coordinator handles all things related to meals, snacks, and refreshments and will direct a small team of volunteers.
Staff Bios
Micah Amundsen
Festival Coordinator (2024), Curation Committee (2024)
Micah Amundsen (aka the Symphony System in many online spaces) is a transmasc plural double-cancer-survivor illustrator and comic book creator local to Rochester MN. They initially got into larping to sort out all the voices in their head, but now that that’s been worked out, they’re even more excited about facilitating games for others than playing anything themselves. Find their creative work at either micahamundsen.com or mycomicsare.gay depending on your mood (both URLs go to the same place)
Jon Cole
Festival Coordinator (2021, 2024), Social Media Coordinator
Jon is a larp practitioner and sex educator in the Twin Cities. He has been featured on Leaving Mundania and at Fastaval. When he is not roleplaying, Jon dances to blues music, watches films, and eats ice cream. His design work can be found at joncole.itch.io.
Rosalie Davis
Kitchen Coordinator
Cake decorator by trade, Rosalie dabbles in all manner of culinary creation. After leaving Virginia for culinary school in Oregon, she has made the Twin Cities her home. She looks forward to keeping everyone happily fed during the festival without making too much of a scene in the kitchen. Next time you have a sweet tooth, check out frostedcanvascakes.com and see what she’s been up to.
Ben Francis
Technical Support
If the robot overloads come to assert their dominance over humankind, Ben is probably partially to blame. In his day job he works in the extremely safe world of politics as a Technical Director. You can follow him on twitter @MasterTierAgent.
Olivia Montoya
Festival Coordinator (2022), Social Media Coordinator
Olivia Montoya (she/her) is a queer, Autistic, Latinx, chronically ill larper who has been larping since 2013, when she began playing games with the Stanford Gaming Society. She has since started writing larps, GMing larps, coding tools for online larps, and creating social spaces to facilitate game design. She has also run several larp-focused game jams in addition to a successful Zine Quest 2 Kickstarter for a TTRPG/larp hybrid game. She was brought on to Make a Scene to help run the Kickstarter for the two anthologies, and later went on to be head organizer for Make a Scene’s first online festival in 2021. Outside of larps, Olivia dabbles in art, TTRPGs, zines, public speaking, crafting, making handmade jewelry, video games, and other programming projects. Find out more about her at her portfolio website: http://www.oliviamontoya.com/
Mark Redacted
Festival Coordinator (2023-2024), Curation Committee (2023-2024)
Mark (he/him) is an enthusiastic omnivore and designer of games of all kinds, and deeply enjoys supporting the scenario design and refinement process. Lucky enough to participate in every year of the festival thus far, he’s served roles ranging from logistics and safety teams to acting as a coordinator for 2023’s festival and curator for 2024. A Minneapolitan for 20+ years, he loves welcoming visitors and showing them around!
Susan Schmidt
Festival Coordinator (2023-2024), Curation Committee (2023-2024), Technical Support
Susan (she/they) enjoys larps, indie tabletop games, and puzzles. She lives in Illinois with her husband and an assortment of real plants and unreal creatures.
Katherine Shane
Festival Coordinator (2019, 2021), Treasurer (2020 – current)
Katherine/Kathy has been active in roleplaying for close to 40 years, first with the time-honored and well-loved Dungeons & Dragons, and over time branching at least a little into nearly everything else with the words “role play” in it somewhere. She has been head-over-heels in love with larp genre since taking part in the US run of Just a Little Lovin’ in 2017, and since then has played in, run and supported many live action games. In her day job, Kathy has worked in social justice nonprofits for her entire career with a focus on grant writing. She loves playing games, painting little plastic models, being queer, messing about with costumes, and cooking large amount of food for people. She is terrible with make-up, high-heels, singing, and languages other than English, but greatly admires people who are good at these things. “My goal with Make a Scene is to bring more people into the hobby I love and play a lot of different games with them. Larp and other role-playing games allow me to safely have experiences and feel emotions, both silly and deep, in ways I would not even want in “real life”. It’s amazing and transformative, and I want to create a space where anyone can try it.”
Former Staff
Tom Fendt
Festival Coordinator (2021-2022)
Tom Fendt is here to have fun and make friends. A Montessori paraprofessional by day and avid role-player by night, you can find them running and playing games at the Twin Cities’ Larp House, designing games as part of Glass-Free* Games, and trying to bring about utopia by supporting children’s (and grown-ups’) intellectual and emotional growth. They consider themself a “realist of a larger reality.”
Nadia Gillitzer
Festival Coordinator (2022), Curation Committee (2022)
Nadia Gillitzer (she/her) lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa with her spouse and child. She is a technology trainer by day and an imaginer of better worlds always. Nadia wrote Repro for Make a Scene 20201, her first scenario but definitely not her last! You can find her on Twitter: @NStenSpid and at hobbittoes.itch.io
Jae Krehbiel
Festival Coordinator (2022)
Jae Krehbiel (any/all) is a creator in the Twin Cities area. Jae has been active in the larp community for four years, but has been writing and crafting games for most of his life. Her favorite larps are those with rich characters and complex interactions. Their works can be found at taquelli.itch.io
Peregrin Winkle
Positive Play Committee
Peregrin (Pip to their friends, Mx. Winkle if you’re nasty) has been an enthusiastic larper for around fifteen years. They started with Werewolf: the Apocalypse and moved on to more independent and freeform games over time. They enjoy costuming, intense LARP feels, and all sorts of cooperative stories. They take player safety, inclusivity, and accessibility very seriously—but not much else. Ask them about red pandas.
Community Partners
Larp House
The Larp House is an inclusive Twin Cities larp community. We are a member-powered collective that offers live-action role-playing games to the public. Larp House supports Make a Scene with a swarm of enthusiastic volunteers, lots of wisdom, many pictures, and of course, the love of larp!
Learn more at larphouse.org.
Episcopal Church in Minnesota
The Episcopal Church in Minnesota (ECMN) is a network of faith communities – churches, schools, non-profits, care centers – that is called to transformation by engaging God’s mission. Though Make a Scene! has no religious affiliation, we are grateful for being able to use their offices for the festival.
Learn more at episcopalmn.org.
Metropolitan Regional Arts Council
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. We are very thankful to have their support.
Learn more at mrac.org.
Photo courtesy of l.p.lade.