Musician, pedagogue, and creative designer Jess Forgione enjoys a multifaceted career that connects music and games. As a keyboardist, she has performed in a variety of musical settings, including classical, jazz, progressive rock, and soundtracks. Her research and compositional work engage with contemporary classical-tradition music, video game music, and other modern styles as both a scholar and a practitioner.
As an educator, Jess strives to create an inclusive, accessible, and engaging learning environment, and her research on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy was recently accepted to Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy. Her teaching background includes music theory, composition, individual and group piano, and music technology. She currently teaches at Central Michigan University and previously taught at Michigan State University.
Jess holds a BM in Composition (with additional studies in Piano Pedagogy) from Baylor University and an MM in Music Theory from Michigan State University. Outside of academia, she has attended the Composition program at Brevard Music Center twice (2024, 2025) and studied at NYU’s Scoring for Video Games Summer Workshop. Her music theory research has won awards from the Texas Society for Music Theory (“Functions of Chromatic Mediants in Video Game Music”) and Music Theory Southeast (“Race, Bias, and Musical Identity in Burleigh’s ‘Ethiopia Saluting the Colors’”).
Outside of her musical and academic work, Jess enjoys tabletop games and works as a game designer for board games and tabletop RPGs. Most recently, she worked on AEGIS: Second Ignition (2025), a combining robot tactics game.
