22.05.1980–?
Satine Phoenix
Satine Phoenix was born in 1980 in the Philippines and grew up in the United States. She illustrated comics and co-created the graphic novel New Praetorians, then moved into tabletop role-playing games: she hosted shows about Dungeons & Dragons and founded the charity project CelebrityChariD20 and the streaming network Maze Arcana. Her collection of drawings, Burning Quill, appeared in 2010.
Biography
In 2010, at the Meltdown Comics shop in Hollywood, Satine Phoenix began running two weekly sessions. One was called DrawMelt: life drawing with models in cosplay costumes. The other, DnDMelt, brought together players of Dungeons & Dragons.
She was born on 22 May 1980 in Olongapo in the Philippines; some references give 1979. She later became a US citizen. By her own account, she began playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1988, at the age of eight.
From 2006 to 2011 she appeared in adult films. Alongside this she drew: in 2010 she took fourth place for Best Comic Artist at the Bondage Awards. That same year a collection of her illustrations, Burning Quill, was published by CreateSpace. With a writer, Syrus, she created the graphic novel New Praetorians. In a 2006 report for the news website AlterNet, the journalist Annalee Newitz described her as a person who had the education and the means to choose any profession. Phoenix made her choice herself.
The turning point came around 2010, when she returned to drawing and gaming. She organised and hosted a charity event, “Celebrity Charity Dungeons & Dragons”, with proceeds going to Reach Out and Read; the project was later renamed CelebrityChariD20. She worked on games and fetish fashion, cosplayed characters from Dungeons & Dragons games, and took part in creating the web series I Hit It with My Axe, distributed by the online magazine The Escapist. In 2008 she appeared in an episode of the series Secret Lives of Women on the WE tv channel and on a morning talk show on Fox. Her portraits were painted by the Swedish artist Karl Backman and photographed by the American photographer Chad Michael Ward. In 2013 she appeared in the short film Minotaur by Javier Grillo-Marxuach. On Geek & Sundry and in the HyperRPG project she was both host and participant. In the third and fourth seasons of the web show TableTop she played alongside Wil Wheaton. In 2017 she hosted the second season of Game Master Tips, a YouTube video series for game masters of tabletop role-playing games; in it she interviewed well-known players, and in December 2017 her last guest was the host of the first season, Matthew Mercer. From 2018 to 2019 she worked as community manager for the Dungeons & Dragons division of Wizards of the Coast.
With Ruty Rutenberg, Phoenix founded the streaming network Maze Arcana, which produced official web series recording games of Dungeons & Dragons: Fury’s Reach (2017), Fury’s Fate (2017–18), Sirens of the Realms (2017–19) and Inkwell Society (2018–19). She took part in them as a game master or a player. The 2018 Diana Jones Award was given to the “actual play” genre, with Maze Arcana named among the examples; Phoenix, Rutenberg and Ivan Van Norman accepted the award at Gen Con. The network stopped operating in 2018.
In 2019 she founded Gilding Light, a livestream production company. In 2021 Apotheosis Studios, founded by Jamison Stone, launched a Kickstarter campaign for Phoenix’s campaign setting book, “Sirens: Battle of the Bards”; the funding goal was reached.
Profile notes