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Meet the 2026 Roots & Pixels Finalists!

We are so proud to introduce our cohort of finalists for the 2026 inaugural edition of Roots & Pixels!

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CONGRATULATIONS,

Azra, Avuzwa, Cassie, Joanna, Mergery, Mijide, Princess, Ruby, Sithe, Kaatje,

Hannah, Catharina, and Ioanna!

Azra Parker

South Africa

Azra Parker is a Game Developer and teacher from Cape Town, South Africa. She is passionate about storytelling and encouraging the next generation of game designers. Her work now focuses on educating and opening doors for young people, particularly girls who don't always see themselves represented in the games industry. She runs a coding school that teaches game development to kids and teens, and she's co-founded a business aimed at bridging the digital skills gap for young people in South Africa.

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Avuzwa Nsthongwana

South Africa

Avuzwa is a project manager at DLA/Fakugesi Digital Africa Festival /Gamehub incubation at Tshimologong innovation precinct and founder, game developer at South Game Studio. She blends creativity and strategy to build socially impactful games while championing Pan-African animation, gaming, and XR talent globally. Her tech journey began after retrenchment, launching Azanian Beans before pivoting to coding during the pandemic. A Google Africa Android programme and a Fakugesi game jam win sparked her career in game development. Her studio now tackles issues like period poverty through innovative projects, including Sizwe Iqhawekazi LakwaZulu, a multi-award-winning game. She is a passionate mentor and believes in empowering youth to explore tech careers, guided by her belief: “When you’re afraid to take the next step, that’s exactly when you should."

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Cassie Simpson

South Africa

Cassie Simpson is an artist and interactive designer from Johannesburg, South Africa. Actively involved in the games and animation industry, she has participated in international festivals, mentorship programs, and community initiatives that champion emerging talent across the African continent. With a triple-major degree in Animation, Interactive Writing, and Marketing, she brings a multidisciplinary lens to every project she takes on.

Cassie is the Marketing Manager at Fabella, a Swedish company bringing game design thinking and playful learning to the eLearning space. She also contributes to interactive design projects within the company, where she focuses on meaningful interactivity, thoughtful storytelling, and accessible, player-centred design.

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Joanna Oluoch

Kenya

Joanna Oluoch is a game designer, digital artist, and software developer from Kenya, with a background in Mechatronics Engineering, who leverages her diverse experience to merge technology, art, and storytelling. Inspired by a childhood spent in Oloolua Forest, Joanna created ARGO (Augmented Reality Guide: Oloolua), her first original game, that aims to foster a symbiotic relationship between visitors and nature.
Each game she creates is a love letter to the experiences, places, and people that have shaped her life. Ultimately, her goal is to create games that spark a sense of “sonder”; the realisation that every character, like every person, has a story as intricate as our own.

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Mergery Wanjiru

Kenya

Mergery is a game designer based in Kenya. She works as a junior Game Designer at Astrapuff and supports emerging African creatives through mentorship and community workshops.

Mijide Keeke

Kenya

Mijide Kemoli is a multidisciplinary designer and the founder of Keeke Art, a creative consultancy based in Nairobi, Kenya that aids non-profit organizations and socially-conscious companies in educating their audiences on a myriad of social issues in a fun and engaging way through art, design and gaming.

With a professional background in art education and community work, Mijide has had the opportunity to speak about the impact of artistic expression in marginalized Kenyan communities in international forums including the 2019 Annual Comparative and International Education Summit held in San Francisco, Humanity Rising 2020: Personal Empowerment and Leadership in Times of Crisis hosted by Ubiquity, and MCW Global’s 2021 Annual Fundraising Gala held in New York. She has also had her journey and work featured on various platforms including For Creative Girls, Youth Time magazine, People Daily, KTN News and Nation. 

Moreover, Mijide’s creative practice has enabled her to attend workshops, conferences and training programmes in Kenya, the USA and Europe, providing her with the skills that allowed her to found and successfully run her multidisciplinary creative consultancy practice. Her clients to date include Amnesty International, APHRC, UN Women, CARE International, Teach for All and The Freedom Fund, just to name a few. Her most notable game design and development projects to date include What Will You Do?, Mbeteza, Gutuka and Tamaduni.

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Princess Kabeya

South Africa

Princess Kabeya is a multimedia creative passionate about turning real stories and ideas into beautiful, purposeful visuals. With nine years of experience in the industry, she has discovered that good design is not only about looks but also about how it makes people feel.

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Ruby Walne

South Africa

Ruby Walne is a game developer and programmer based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Growing up she had a keen interest in problem solving and technology (all while desperately trying to get her favourite games to work on ancient hardware). Now, after a short stint in the tech industry, she's creating her own games as a programmer, both independently and in a team.
She is heavily invested in her local game dev community, attending events and game jams, even winning a few. Ruby strives to create a supportive space that encourages people to get involved in their local game dev communities.

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Sithe Ncube

South Africa

Sithe has been an active member of the African game development community since 2013, beginning with organizing community events in Lusaka, Zambia. She is passionate about advancing opportunities for games to be used as a medium of cultural expression and preservation for underrepresented voices. Her background in Computer Science informs her interest in the technical side of game development but she’s also taken a great interest in how people power our world of play. She is currently a producer at Nyamakop in South Africa working on the heist game Relooted."

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Kaatje Geerits

Belgium

Kaatje is a technical sound designer who recently graduated from Digital Arts and Entertainment. After completing a bachelor’s degree in Television and Film, she developed a strong interest in sound creation and implementation, alongside a growing curiosity for game development. This led her to pursue a second degree focused on game sound integration, allowing her to combine both fields.

Hannah Peeters

Belgium

Hannah Peeters is a freelance concept artist working in the indie game scene, as well as a teacher/content creator at Artwod and Syntra. As a kid she deeply loved stories and spent all her days drawing characters and places from imagination. Now that this is what she does for work and something she teaches others how to do, it is needless to say that it often doesn’t feel like “work” to her at all.

One of her favourite parts of her job has been meeting the creative community that comes with it. To be passionate about creating meaningful stories, characters and worlds, and finding that same passion in others has been the driving force behind everything she does. This is why she loves teaching too, because there is nothing else she would rather talk for hours about. If anything, she hopes enough of that passion rubs off on her students so they will tell their own stories one day.

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Catharina Broes

Belgium

Catharina is a Game Artist, DAE graduate from Belgium with a special interest in environments and props. She got to that role due to a childhood filled with all kinds of art, playing video games and having many international travels that inspired her to create her own stories, experiences and environments. With a groundwork set in traditional art, architecture, art history, theatre and music, there isn't a form of expression she is unfamiliar with. Her goal is to create impactful, insightful experiences that inspire both the consumer and the creator to escape and appreciate life, whether that is through beauty, melancholy or something else entirely. During her studies, Catharina discovered a passion for community and has carried that over to later endeavours of her life, working on projects such as "Lesbian Simulator", a VR narrative experience detailing what it's like to be a queer woman in Northern Europe. Other projects involve "Station to Station", "Town To City" and "Drone Tanks", the debut title for the Belgian start-up Ludum Elite, where she currently volunteers as main 3D artist.

Ioanna Efthymiadou

Belgium / Greece

Ioanna Efthymiadou is an artist and game designer from Greece, currently residing in Belgium. She has a background in Philosophy and Education, and after completing her Master’s degree, she decided to become involved in game development as a way to share stories and ideas that resonate with her. Her academic background always informs her creative practices, and she enjoys challenging prevailing concepts and ideas we have of games as playful, yet culturally significant form of expression. As game development becomes more and more accessible, she believes this is an important moment for queer and female developers to contribute their own perspectives and narratives, while exploring alternative approaches to storytelling, worldbuilding, and immersion. From a young age, she has been inspired by any form of storytelling such as games, film, and literature and has experimented with various media. Currently, her primary interest lies in 3D graphics, specifically environment creation and prop design. She is working as a freelance 3D artist and designer in Brussels and is actively involved in the local indie game community.

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