Theresa Duncan

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Theresa Duncan (October 26, 1966 — July 10, 2007) was an American game designer, blogger, filmmaker and critic.

1 Life
2 Works
3 Death
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Life

Theresa Lee Duncan was born in Lapeer, Michigan, near Detroit to Donnie and Mary Duncan. She had a sister, Deanna and a brother, Scott.

Duncan was a writer, filmmaker, and computer-game creator who became known in the 1990s for developing the "girl-centric" (story-based) video games Chop Suey, Smarty Pants, and Zero Zero. She lived with Jeremy Blake in Los Angeles until 2007, when she and Blake moved to Manhattan.

On her blog, Duncan listed her interests as "film, philology, Vietnam War memorabilia, rare and discontinued perfume, book collecting, philately, card and coin tricks, futurism, Napoleon Bonaparte, the history of electricity."

[edit] Works

Duncan produced three video games distributed as CD-ROMs. The games were designed to be alternatives to a traditionally male-dominated field. They emphasize search and discovery over combat and conflict. The games won several awards, including People magazine's best CD-ROM of the year.

Theresa wrote and directed an animated film, The History of Glamour, which was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial. The film details the semi-autobiographical journey of a young woman from a small town to the glamour of New York; she ultimately rejects it all to return home to pursue her writing career.

Theresa's essays and film and literary criticism were published in Artforum, Slate, Salon and Bald Ego.

When she died, Theresa was working on the film Nick's Trip with her longtime boyfriend Blake.

[edit] Death

Theresa Duncan was found dead on July 10, 2007. The official cause of death was suicide as a result of the combined ingestion of diphenhydramine and alcohol. Blake is believed to have killed himself a week later, having been seen by an anonymous 911 caller walking into the Atlantic Ocean near Rockaway Beach. According to friends of the couple, Jeremy and Theresa believed that they were being followed and harassed by Scientologists up to the point of their deaths. ^[1]