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.

Caroline has been in the games industry since 2013 where she started at EA as an office manager but quickly found herself helping out producers on a game team and then getting hired on as a development manager.

After working on game teams for several years, Caroline developed a passion for external development while managing a project between an EA studio and a Chinese developer/publisher. In 2017, she transitioned into an external development manager role on EA’s XDI team.

In 2022, Caroline took a Senior Producer role at Riot Games, helping launch their central external development team.

Caroline is passionate about building and maintaining healthy partnerships, influencing positive cultural change and establishing efficient process through creative problem solving and innovation.

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, client expansion, branding and marketing.

Phil started his career over 30 years ago building 8-bit games at Realtime Associates.  The day an Intel 486 showed up on his desk was a revelation.  He’s been the Project Art Director at Zipper Interactive (Sony), managed the Art Department at ArenaNet, built VR at Oculus, and is now with Amazon Games, working on an ambitious External Development Program.  Phil never gets tired of telling teams, “Yes, I can find you a great partner to help build your vision."

Isabelle has been working at Ubisoft for more than 15 years, where she's been an active and passionate player for all aspects related to collaboration.

After spending multiple years as a CoDev & Outsourcing Project Manager, she joined Assassin's Creed Valhalla development team in 2018 as their Associate Producer Co-development.

Isabelle now acts as a Director of Partnerships, CoDev & Outsourcing on the Assassin's Creed Brand. Her long-term experience is an asset for the production teams to ensure it keeps evolving their ways of working in collaboration with studios around the world; but also to continue building strong relationships with both internal and external partners.

Isabelle has also been an active member of the XDS Advisory Committee since 2016.

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.

From her early years as both a gymnastics and diving athlete, Nikki has turned her lifelong connection with movement into a thriving career as a technical artist and UX designer. Nikki has spent her professional career navigating the pipelines of real-time development at companies such as Apple, EA, Lucasfilm and now Google. She specializes in real-time interactions and focuses on experiences that capture and represent assets in seamless and innovative ways.

With experience in games, film, virtual production, VR, ML and AR, Nikki is passionate about fostering collaboration across these industries and empowering diverse perspectives to push the boundaries of real-time development.

Alex Stein has worked in the video games industry for over 20 years, with roughly half of that involved in external development. He has a passion for establishing and improving pipelines, and for helping improve development practices industry wide.

Ciaran is the Art Manager & Outsource at PlayStation London Studio. As part of the Art Leadership, he oversees and directs future strategy on processes, workflow, resources and technologies for external development and the studio’s art disciplines. Ciaran is focused on bridging together the external partners and development teams by integrating them into the creative process in an efficient way, helping the studio make landmark games for PlayStation.

With over 10 years of production experience in the games industry Toby has recently joined the new studio That’s No Moon Entertainment as their VP of Global Production.  He is responsible for the identification, contracting, onboarding, relationship management, and production management of all external partnerships for the studio.

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.

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.

I am a Shanghai native who grew up on hockey and maple syrup. I started in the game industry as the co-founder and CEO of Mindwalk Studios, a computer graphics and animation outsource company based in Beijing. As of January 2018, I took on a new challenge as the Service Line Director for Keywords Art and Marketing Services serving 1400 employees worldwide, supporting them to deliver the highest quality, innovative, and creative art that is true to our client’s vision.

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.

David Lam has been working in the games industry for over 20 years. He started out locally in Vancouver as a student at VFS and quickly found himself drawn to character art. David has had a long career at Electronic Arts working on titles such as SSX, NBA Street, Need for Speed, FIFA, and NHL. During his time as a production artist, David found enjoyment and fulfillment in teaching. He has taught BCIT, Think Tank Training Center, and VanArts. He has also participated as a demo artist for Wacom. David joined Bioware in 2012 as an Associate External Art Director and continued in a broader role as Senior Art Manager supporting the Edmonton, Montreal and Austin studios. In 2018, David accepted a new role at Turn10, a first party Xbox studio, as Senior Producer supporting external development for the Forza franchise. In 2021, David was recruited by Riot to lead one of their key art teams on League of Legends as Director of Art Management. David has recently moved on from Riot as he accepted a new role with Netease as Executive Producer of ADC in North America. David also has an expanded role with XDS as co-chair of the XDS Advisory Board.

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.

Chris is 20-year veteran of the videogame industry, beginning his tenure with Electronic Arts developing Sports and Action titles, and after which time he supported the external development needs of the organization. Chris now acts as Executive Producer, and Chair for the XDS Advisory Committee, which ensures excellence in the delivery of the internationally acclaimed XDS event. Chris has held board positions with Vancouver Centre for Entertainment Arts, ACM SIGGRAPH Vancouver, and Vancouver Film School, and has delivered sessions at games industry events in the UK, UAE, Brazil, Colombia, Croatia and Russia.

External Development veteran 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. Joined the XDS Advisory Committee in the same year, where he remains excited by the future of external development and a passionate advocate for what we can achieve together.

Carla has been active in the games industry since 2005 where she started as an Artist at Supersonic Software in the UK. She's been focused on External Development for 10+ years both in the UK and Canada at game developers such as Microsoft's Lionhead Studio, XBOX's The Coalition Studio, and EA.

In 2022, Carla acquired the role of Head of External Production with Behaviour Digital, owning the development process for all External Production.

Carla's passion for process, culture, team management, and KPIs has led her to host various talks at XDS conferences.

Dave is a seventeen year veteran of business & creative development for games, film, and television. In 2018 Dave joined Phoenix Labs, where he specializes in connecting internal challenges with external solutions. Dave has been an XDS attendee since 2015 and a member of the XDS Advisory Committee since 2020.