
Melissa Malzkuhn
Storyteller, Digital Strategist & Creative Director
Melissa Malzkuhn is a storyteller, digital strategist, and creative director with a fascination for languages, word play, and immersive experiences. As Director of Motion Light Lab at Gallaudet University, Melissa Malzkuhn leads creative development and research, and she is a founder of Ink & Salt, a creative productions company. Melissa Malzkuhn is a storyteller, digital strategist, and creative director with a fascination for languages, word play, and immersive experiences. As Director of Motion Light Lab at Gallaudet University, Melissa Malzkuhn leads creative development and research.
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The Boy Who Ate Words
“The Boy Who Ate Words” is an interactive narrative based game. The protagonist lives in a world where he is constantly given commands – what to do and what not to do everyday and everywhere. One day, frustrated, he ATE a word! Unbeknownst to the boy, every time he eats a word, the corresponding object disappears – as words construct our understanding of the world. Wandering alone, boy is upset and now hiccupping letters… it’s up to players to help him restore his world by matching the letters!
The ASL App
“The ASL App” is an iOS app (formatted for iPhone, iPad and iPod) that teaches you conversational ASL on the go, designed for the new signer packed with over 400 sign videos.
City Signs
Commissioned by the Washington Post Express, I created illustrations and GIFs of local ASL signs for Washington DC. This is part of an ongoing series of illustrating your cities, which originated in Alicia DeSantis and Jennifer Daniel’s Visual Writing class.
Mise En Komix
This is a loose adaption (and inspiration) from Klassik Komix by Steven Millhauser. Millhauser set out to provoke the question of “art for art’s sake” in his text. Drawing from that premises, I wanted to do a story for story’s sake, or more apt, a dream within a dream. Through this stop motion animation, I wanted to combine something absurd with real and reverse roles. This is an experiment with sign language – how far can I go without destroying our comprehension (and context) of the whole story?
Tink's Wink
This is a stop motion animation about a little moon spirit named Tink, who gets in trouble at the dream factory.
The latest on Melissa
Melissa was accepted into the inaugural Obama 2018 Fellows class! Obama Foundation ran a story on their site about her work on literacy for deaf children
Won NSF EAGER grant for a project using VR to teach ASL
Got awarded for “SignShare” project under Sign on for Literacy to build a platform where users can create and share stories to build literature for young deaf readers
Awarded Library of Congress Best Practice honoree for work on Storybook Creator
Her ASL App hit 2 million downloads (iOS and Android combined).
Connections
Alumni