Michelle Woods

Michelle Woods has worked in the gaming industry since 1999. Michelle began their career as a Designer and Producer at The Learning Company, where they designed a variety of children's educational software titles and served as Producer for Reader Rabbit and StarFlyers titles. In 2003, they worked as an Exhibit Developer at The Tech Museum of Innovation. From 2005 to 2011, they worked at PlayFirst, Inc. as a Senior Game Designer, where they led design from concept to launch of hit casual games like Diner Dash 2, Diner Dash Hometown Hero, Wedding Dash, Avenue Flo, and Avenue Flo 2. Michelle also wrote GDDs, design specs, stories, and thousands of lines of character dialog for narrative-driven games, and designed and built hundreds of levels for time management games, mini-games, and puzzle games. From 2011 to 2015, they worked as a Senior Game Designer at Disney Interactive, where they led design on major components of a large free-to-play Facebook game featuring Disney/Pixar IP, creating content (mini-games, puzzles, story sequences, character dialog). Michelle also freelanced in 2015, designing and building levels in Unity for Peggle Blast on mobile for PopCap Games, and designing content for The Foos, a game developed by codeSpark that teaches children programming skills. Since 2017, they have been a Lead Game Designer at Haiku Games, where they design games for their popular Adventure Escape Mysteries app, which combines adventure gameplay and puzzles with engaging storylines. Michelle has designed and written six murder mysteries, one archaeological adventure, and one fantastical journey through paintings.

Michelle Woods obtained a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology from Stanford University between 1993 and 1997. Michelle then went on to Syracuse University where they obtained a Master's Degree in Television, Radio & Film between 1997 and 1998.