Carla is a video games industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, specializing in External Development for more than a decade. She has held key roles at Xbox (The Coalition, Lionhead), EA (XDI), and Behaviour Interactive.

Her passion for process, culture, and team management has led her to speak at several XDS conferences, where she champions efficiency, inclusion, and best practices.

As Head of Business Solutions for XDS Spark and Chair of the XDS Advisory Committee, she is dedicated to advancing industry knowledge, fostering strong partnerships, and driving sustainable practices.

External Development veteran and XDS Advisory Committee member who started in the games industry as an artist. Began working with external teams at Sumo Digital in 2007, before becoming Outsource Manager; successfully guiding Sumo’s fledgling India studio into a fully integrated partner, while overseeing their rapidly expanding external development program. Took a central position at Xbox Games Studios in 2014 to support and guide their Global Studios with External Development Partnerships.

In 2024, after 10 years at Xbox he left to co-found XDS Spark with Chris Wren. A platform designed to bring service providers and buyers together while advancing and advocating for external developments exciting future.

Isabelle Bismuth has been with Ubisoft for over 20 years, where she has consistently championed collaboration across teams and studios with passion and purpose.

After several years as a Co-Development and Outsourcing Project Manager for Ubisoft’s Canadian studios, she joined the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla development team in 2018 as Associate Producer, Co-Development. Today, she serves as Director of Studio Partnerships for the Assassin’s Creed Franchise, working as part of the franchise’s leadership team.

Isabelle’s extensive experience is a key asset in evolving production practices and strengthening collaboration with internal and external partners worldwide. Her work continues to shape how Ubisoft builds and nurtures long-term, trust-based relationships across the industry.

She has also been an engaged member of the XDS Advisory Committee since 2016.

Caroline has spent the past 13 years in the games industry, working in production and external development at companies like EA and Riot Games. Today, she partners with developers/publishers and service providers to build thoughtful, effective approaches to external development.

She believes external development partnerships work best when business strategy supports creative vision, and when collaborations are rooted in trust and clear communication rather than just contracts. Caroline is passionate about helping teams on both sides of the relationship build sustainable practices that set everyone up for long-term success.

Guillaume began his video game industry career early at Ubisoft where he worked on several famous AAA titles. In 2009, with his knowledge in marketing and business development, Guillaume joined and later became the COO of Glass Egg Digital Media - one of the world’s leading 3D art outsourcing companies.

With his passion & depth of experience in the game industry, he has been a driving force to the company's development through recruitment, training, client expansion, branding and marketing.

Following Glass Egg's Acquisition by Virtuos in 2022, Guillaume joined the Virtuos group and is currently working as a Key Account Manager.

With over 15 years of production experience in the games industry Toby serves as the VP of Global Production for the up-and-coming studio That’s No Moon Entertainment.

He is responsible for the identification, contracting, onboarding, relationship management, and production management of all external partnerships for the studio. In addition, he has been a member of the XDS Advisory Committee for 8 years.

In the past he has worked on large scale external art production on titles such as Days Gone, Death Stranding, Marvel’s Spider-man, and MLB The Show amongst others.

David Lam is a seasoned games industry veteran with over two decades of experience, showcasing a remarkable trajectory from character artist to senior leadership roles. After establishing his career at Electronic Arts on major franchises like SSX, NBA Street, Need for Speed, FIFA, and NHL, David progressively took on greater responsibilities. He served as Senior Art Manager at BioWare, overseeing art development across multiple studios, and later as Senior Producer at Turn 10 Studios, managing external development for the Forza franchise. His leadership continued at Riot Games as Director of Art Management for League of Legends, and as Executive Producer at NetEase, leading their North American central content team. David also contributed significantly as co-chair of the XDS Advisory Board for two years. He currently holds the position of Associate Director of Outsourcing at Blizzard Entertainment.

After 15 years of project management and systems work in Energy, JC found his calling at BioWare in 2005. Ever since, he has been expanding and enhancing the studio group’s ability to create the best story-based games in the world through global partnerships in art, animation, cinematics, UI/UX, and engineering. JC has worked on every BioWare title since Neverwinter Nights, including Jade Empire, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises, Anthem, and all unannounced titles.

Philip Dennison is a Senior External Development Manager at Epic Games, facilitating partnerships to support content and co-dev across Epic’s first-party teams. He has more than 20 years in the industry including roles in art and production, but the majority of his career has been dedicated to external development. He has led outsourcing efforts for Monolith Productions, Psyonix, and recently Fortnite projects.

A regular XDS speaker, Philip is known for his practical insights on agreement strategy and sustainability in business relationships.

Carl got his start in games in 1994. Carl has worked at small and large companies alike from a buyer and a service provider perspective, most notably Michael Crichton’s Timeline Entertainment, Nvidia, Electronic Arts and his current role as Senior Director of External Development at Zynga. In this Business Operations role, he has built a worldwide organization which facilitates all of Zynga’s external development and partner relations involving Art, Engineering, Audio, UI/UX, Co-Dev, QA, Localization/LQA, Narrative, UA and Marketing/Publishing. In addition, Carl helps coordinate and facilitate M&A integrations for Zynga and its subsidiaries.

Arun Honne-Gowda, with over 19 years of experience has managed and led at various levels, started his career as a 3D art generalist, initiated & lead a CG animation service studio in India and worked for studios like Sony, EA, MPC, Axis, Jagex where he worked on games (console, VR, mobile and PC), CG animation, CG movies; titles like RuneScape, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Book of Spells, Project Morpheus, Prometheus, Clash of the Titans, Sucker Punch and others. With the experience of working on both sides of external development / outsourcing and small & large global teams, he is passionate about distributed development, championing xDev for teams to scale up with speed.

Nikki aims to transform content in innovative ways for innovative applications through real-time technology. Drawing from a background in gymnastics, diving, and climbing, she specializes in capturing creativity and translating movement into immersive experiences. With a career spanning Apple, EA, Lucasfilm, Google, and Meta, she has worked across games, film, VR, AR, Simulation and UX. Nikki actively pushes the boundaries of real-time technology and is dedicated to fostering collaborative, diverse teams through internal and external partnerships.

Co-founder of Twisted Works, Ciaran brings over a decade of leadership experience from PlayStation Studios. Formerly leading External Development, Art, and Animation at London Studio, he excels at refining complex processes, building scalable workflows, and fostering partner collaboration across teams, projects and regions. He now takes this expertise forward, overseeing operations at Twisted Works to create a sustainable, scalable development studio that leverages the strength of external partnerships to create engaging and meaningful shared experiences.

Walter de Torres is a Founding Partner of Pixel Mafia, an art services company located in the Philippines. After more than 15 years directly managing game development teams, Walter, alongside Coby Chan decided to switch over to the services side of the games industry by establishing Pixel Mafia in 2017. Prior to this, Walter was the Head of Production for the Gears of War franchise at The Coalition Studio and before that, he was a Group Development Director at EA.

Dave Sanderson is a 20-year veteran of the entertainment industry, and has specialized in external development since 2015. Dave has held lead roles in business and creative development across the spectrum of games, film, and television, most recently at Scopely and Phoenix Labs. Dave joined the XDS Advisory Committee in 2020.

Phil is the Co-Dev and Outsource Lead for Amazon Games. He has over 30 years of game development experience as a Content Creator, Art Director and Program Manager. Phil guides the strategy and implementation of external development across Amazon Games, supporting all development teams, disciplines and central groups. He manages partner relationships, and builds the systems and processes that lead to successful engagements.ience as a Content Creator, Art Director and Program Manager. Phil guides the strategy and implementation of external development across Amazon Games, supporting all development teams, disciplines and central groups. He manages partner relationships, and builds the systems and processes that lead to successful outcomes.

While being a gamer from his childhood, Sviatoslav began his professional journey in the gaming industry in his early 20s, being involved in PC MMO FPS game development at Vostok Games before his passion for gaming led him to become CEO of Room 8 Studio; a games development company, and later transformed to the Room 8 Group, 1700+ talent company located in more than 10 countries, the most organically fast growing company in external development globally. Family-first, challenge-driven and quality obsessed.

Shiew Yeu Loh is the Senior Art Outsourcing Manager at Riot Games overseeing unannounced projects. Before Riot, she held key roles at EA, Amber Studio and Pocket Gems. She specializes in building scalable art pipelines, mentoring teams, and driving cross-functional alignment across diverse projects including AAA, mobile, and blockchain games. A game industry veteran, she started as a texture artist, a generalist and a producer in 2004 before working at Electronic Arts as the Senior External Development Artist for 14 years in the Sims Franchise. She has been an avid speaker regarding topics that center around effective communication, overcoming cultural barriers, empowering OS managers, motherhood in gaming and diversity.

At Snowed In Studios, Nigel is part of the management team that planned the growth of the studio from 25 to 200 game developers over five years. A project manager by training, Nigel has scaled up studios and game dev teams since 1994 in the US and Canada. Nigel was the producer for Next Level Games’ first console titles, development director at EA Black Box for the Need for Speed series, and he ran development for over 30 TV streaming apps including the Disney and NFL platforms. He holds an MBA from the University of Ottawa.