The Jury

Ben Dever, son of Lone Wolf’s creator Joe Dever, collaborated with his father on the books Twilight of Eternal Night and Death in the Abyss. After his father’s death in 2016, Ben took over the Lone Wolf legacy.

A culture organiser, expert in territorial marketing, transmedia storytelling and participatory cultures. Since 2018, Emanuele has been the general manager of Lucca Crea S.r.l. and director of Lucca Comics & Games, Europe’s most relevant festival dedicated to gaming, comics and creative industries. He is manager and author of several edutainment and gamification projects such as Dark Ride, The web-game (INDIRE 2007), Terre di Optimalia (Best Italian Educational Programme in 2008), BluTube and Scarty (about the water cycle and waste management). Since the beginning of 2000 he has been among the first curators of exhibitions dedicated to fantasy art, imaginative realism and concept art (among the main ones: the solo shows on John Howe, Alan Lee, Iain McCaig, James Gurney, Justin Sweet, Donato Giancola, Stephan Martiniere and the group show on Assassin’s Creed The Art of Brotherhood).

A member of the Lucca Games staff since 2004, Alessandro Stanchi is a journalist and games expert, as well as an economist and university lecturer. He was Fantasy Editor of the Armenia Publishing Group, one of the main publishers of Heroic Fantasy fiction in Italy, publishing the most important US authors including Margaret Weis, R.A. Salvatore and Tracy Hickman.

Born in ‘69 and with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering in his drawer, Paolo has collaborated with the daily newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport since 2007, writing about video games and technology. Passionate about games in every form (video games, board games and role-playing games), he started writing about gaming around the age of 20, for the well-known publisher Studio IT (better known for the Fantacalcio franchise). He loves cats and pizza, and has not yet been to jail. He has been President of the Jury since 2017.

He worked for multinational entertainment companies on iconic video games such as Fifa, The Sims and Crash Bandicoot before becoming one of the pioneers of gamification. He teaches at numerous universities and academies, including the New Media Chair at the International Film School of Cuba. He is the author of numerous essays such as L’Arte del Coinvolgimento (Hoepli), #GameDesigner (Franco Angeli) and PLAY – Videogame, Arte ed Oltre (Sagep). In recent years he has combined art and video games by founding the artist collective TuoMuseo with million-selling
games and is a consultant for the gaming area of the Cinema Museum in Turin.

Voice of the international rock metal band Lacuna Coil. With over 2 million copies sold, more than 1500 concerts worldwide and millions of social views, her musical and television collaborations are multifarious. In 2018 she was a judge on the evening TV show on Rai Uno The Voice and was a guest on the main stage at Lucca Comics & Games together with Lacuna Coil. In 2019, and again in 2021, she appeared on the covers of Batman as a comic character. She collaborates or has collaborated with Wizards of the Coast (Magic: the Gathering), Blizzard Entertainment (Diablo II Resurrected), Sony Playstation, Nintendo, Marvel, Astro Gaming, Elgato, and is brand ambassador for the Monster Energy company. In 2022 she hosted the Lucca comics & Games digital festival.

Giulio Lughi (www.giuliolughi.it), long-time editor of the LibroGame series that introduced Lupo Solitario to Italy in 1985, was a professor at the University and Polytechnic University of Turin, where he taught Theory and Technique of Digital Media, Interactive Storytelling, Digital Media Cultures, Theories of Storytelling, Multimedia Publishing. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Brown University in Providence (RI), has held institutional leadership roles in the field of digital media, and serves on the scientific-editorial committees of various specialist journals. His publications include the volumes: Words Online. Dall’ipertesto all’editoria multimediale; Cultura dei nuovi media; Creatività digitale. Come liberare il potenziale delle nuove tecnologie.  He is particularly concerned with the cultural aspects of immersive visualisation and the relationship between AI and contemporary art.