Shawn Allen

On a sweltering day in August of 1982 Shawn Alexander Allen was born in a tenement building in the East Village of New York. His mother, a poet and aspiring paralegal, his estranged dad, a local musician, playing clubs from Max’s Kansas City to CBGBs.

Shawn attained a BFA in Graphic Design and Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts. Afterwards he went on to work on trailers, web videos, short films, cinematics and scripts for Rockstar Games, helping push games like GTA IV, Red Dead Redemption, and GTA V into record setting sales achievements.

Shawn left the blockbuster games space to start his own company, Nuchallenger, to focus on numerous projects including new media art, games, writing, and speaking/consulting. Shawn has gone on to successfully crowdfund his game Treachery in Beatdown City, create a gallery based multiplayer game called Corporate Vandals that was commissioned by the NYU Game Center, exhibited in the Museum of the Moving Image, worked on numerous VR projects from museum pieces to architectural walkthroughs, designed large scale pieces that were canceled and therefore can’t be talked about here, consulted on marketing and realty purchases and design for companies, and he has spoken at numerous conferences about crowdfunding, artistic inspiration, and diversity and inclusion and how they matter in terms of hiring, creativity, business, culture, and design.