Elonka Dunin

Elonka Dunin is a lifetime member of the International Game Developers Association, Chairperson Emerita and a founding member of the IGDA's Online Games SIG, and a co-Director of the Global Game Jam from 2011-2014. For over two decades she was Executive Producer and General Manager of Online Community at Simutronics Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri, making award-winning multiplayer, social, casual, and mobile games such as GemStone, DragonRealms, Tiny Heroes, and One Epic Knight. She then moved to Nashville, Tennessee to build a new game studio, Black Gate Games. As of 2020, she lives in Rockville, Maryland, a northwestern suburb of Washington, D.C., working as a consultant and Agile Coach, using games to teach team-building techniques.

Born in Los Angeles, Elonka studied Astronomy at UCLA, and then joined the United States Air Force. She was stationed at RAF Mildenhall in the United Kingdom, and Beale Air Force Base in California, where she worked on the SR-71 and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Along with her other achievements, Elonka is a world-traveler who speaks several languages, and has visited scores of countries around the world. She has visited every continent including Antarctica, which she traveled to in 1999. Her lifelong interest in cryptography became public when in 2000 she was awarded a prize for being the first person to crack the PhreakNIC Code, an up-until-Elonka unsolved puzzle created by the hacker group se2600. After the sad events of September 11th, Elonka helped out with the war on terrorism by teaching government agents about cryptography and what types of codes that Al Qaeda was using.

Elonka is also one of the leaders of a group of cryptographers who are working hard to crack a code on the famous Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters, and led the international team that cracked the related KGB Cyrillic Projector Cipher in 2003. Elonka is an avid Wikipedian, having written or expanded over 500 articles on Wikipedia. And as a public speaker, Elonka regularly gives talks on her favorite subjects: Games, Wikipedia, geocaching, and cryptography.

CNN / Great Big Story 2019 video about Elonka and her cryptography obsession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwdUwevayRU

For more info, see http://www.elonka.com/bio.html