Emily Craven – CEO (She/Her)
Emily is the Chief Instigator of Imaginary Worlds at Story City (aka CEO), where she spends her days turning sidewalks into story portals and weekends debating whether dragons or dinosaurs make better tour guides. With 80+ interactive stories, six books, and over 100 international talks under her belt, she’s a one-woman narrative wrecking ball—building choose-your-adventure experiences in the real world using only a phone and an overactive imagination.
Before founding Story City, she worked in publishing, she was the digital producer for the if:book Australia digital storytelling lab, and was crowned Young Writer & Publisher of the Year in a past life. If you’re lucky, she’ll still agree to edit your book as there’s nothing she loves more than pulling apart plot holes.
She’s our resident Aussie, karaoke queen and a reformed astrophysicist (yes, really). Emily moved to Canada to help creators build careers in the cities they love by transforming their neighbourhoods into open-air storybooks.
Brett Ludwig – CTO (He/Him)
Brett is the Grand Architect of Code at Story City, responsible for conjuring the tech magic that lets stories bloom on city streets. With 20+ years in mobile and gaming (hello Bioware: Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Anthem), and a side hustle as a professional a cappella singer (seriously), Brett is both left-brained legend and right-brained rogue.
He built the full Story City platform from scratch—from mobile app to creator tools to back-end dev ops—and still finds time to do voiceover and sound design. He’s the kind of wizard who casually solves scaling issues while harmonizing show tunes. His secret weapons? Agile frameworks, coffee, and a deep love of building tools that empower creative people.
Tim Souza – Head of Community (He/Him)
Tim is Story City’s resident connector of dots, hearts, and humans. With a background in peace, justice, tech, and business (University of Waterloo), Tim has built partnership ecosystems everywhere from Microsoft to Thomson Reuters. At Story City, he uses those powers for good—gathering communities, creators, and civic dreamers to co-build stories that make cities sing.
Tim doesn’t just manage community; he ignites it. Fluent in English and Spanish, he’s the friendly firestarter behind our creator programs and ambassador networks. His north star? Empathy at scale. His motto? The more, the magical-er. You’ll find him mapping walkable dreams and solving logistical puzzles with spreadsheet wizardry and infectious enthusiasm.
Caitlin Burns – Head of Audience Development (She/Her)
Caitlin is the fan whisperer of Story City. With 15+ years of worldbuilding and audience development across Disney, Warner Bros., and DC, she knows how to make stories go viral—without sacrificing soul. She launched a location-based film at Tribeca and co-created campaigns for IP juggernauts from Avatar to Halo.
At Story City, Caitlin brings audiences into the adventure—whether they’re following a ghost, chasing a bride, or geocaching a glitchy AI. Her superpower is making fans feel like co-authors. Equal parts strategist and story alchemist, she architects fandoms with longevity, joy, and a spark of mischief.
Shae Biron – Marketing Director (She/Her)
Shae is Story City’s marketing sorceress—equal parts strategist, hype squad, and Web3 wrangler. Head of Marketing at Candy Digital, she masterminded go-to-market campaigns for the DC Comics NFT Marketplace, turning pixels into profits and storydrops into sellouts. If it can be memed, Shae has already done it (in three languages).
She’s fluent in both brand voice and viral engagement, blending sharp analytics with sparkling creative. Her campaigns don’t just launch—they explode, with engagement rates that make algorithms weep. At Story City, she brings that fire to our most magical marketing yet: Universal Adventures.
Justin Khan – Head of Product (He/Him)
Justin is Story City’s pixel-perfect puzzle master. As Head of Product, he translates wild storytelling dreams into clean, intuitive user flows. With a background in UX design, a past life at Bioware, and a current life as producer at Nightdive/Atari (System Shock remake, anyone?), Justin knows how to build games that feel like magic.
Retro gamer. UX whisperer. Design sage. Justin took the choose-your-adventure genre and made it playable in real life. He led the prototyping and design of our Universal Adventures platform, crafting a UI that lets creators build wild interactive stories without writing a line of code. When he’s not designing branching narratives, he’s probably at an arcade machine.
Matt Mihilewicz – Producer (He/Him)
For the last 15+ years Matt has worked as a creative in a multitude of ways. He’s worked as an actor, and has trained at both Vancouver Film School and the University of Alberta, earning a diploma in Acting for Film and Television from the former, and a BFA in Acting from the latter. He’s written various pieces and scripts for theatre, film, video games, and has written and self published a sci-fi/fantasy novel, The Chronicles of AzzaNation: Dawn of a New Age. He also leads his own entertainment company, Fish in Suits Entertainment, and loves to entertain audiences any way he can.
Matt works for Story City as a wrangler of stories/creators. For the layman we’ll call him a ‘Producer’. When a project comes to Story City, Matt is working with local creatives, editing, motivating, brainstorming, and keeping the project on track.
Whether it’s through video games, books, movies, ttrpgs, you name it – Matt loves stories in all shapes and forms.