Katie Salen is a game designer, animator, and design educator. She is a professor in the DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media. She has taught at Parsons The New School for Design the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has an MFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Salen is one of the co-authors of Rules of Play, a textbook on game design, and the co-editor of the The Game Design Reader, a Rules of Play Anthology. She is the former Director of Graduate Students for the Design and Technology Program at Parsons The New School for Design, as well as the former Director of the Center for Transformative Media, a research center focused on emerging trends in design and media. She is the Executive Director of Institute of Play, which promotes game design as a non-traditional educational tool. In 2009, she helped launch Quest to Learn (Q2L), a new public school in Manhattan, New York City, for which she is the Executive Director of Design.