Shanel Lara Locke 

MFA Candidate: Media Arts

Shanel is a Navy veteran, mother, professional chef, and artist.  Shanel started taking classes in the media arts department online when she was teaching art in K-12 schools when COVID began.  Shanel needed an outlet for all the stress and missed higher education.  She came across game design when she started taking classes involving coding and technical art.  After realizing games were such an important and wonderful medium that could be used as a tool to talk about important issues in a safe environment.  Shanel decided to pursue her master’s degree.  She hopes to produce a video game that will show the challenges in American education (at least from her perspective), the loneliness/isolation of the job, and how one’s gender/sexual orientation can change how people respect a teacher in a school environment.