Vancouver Film School awards Women in Games Scholarship to four students

For the first time ever, Vancouver Film School has named more than one recipient for its annual Women in Games Scholarship.

This year, four women—Janel Jolly of Canada, Nicha Jaijadesuk of Thailand, Jaymee Mak of Australia, and Anna Prein of Russia—have won full-tuition scholarships to VFS's one-year game-design program.

“When we first started the Women in Games Scholarship, I was very excited to see one or two candidates who really stood out – applicants I truly believed could make an impact in the game industry,” Dave Warfield, head of game design at VFS, said in a news release today (March 5). “But this year, it was impossible to choose just one candidate out of a staggering range of applicants from all over the world. The applications were of such a high quality that we had no choice but to award scholarships to these four incredible women."

According to the VFS release, the scholarship is meant to help address the gender imbalance in the video-game industry.

Previous scholarship winners include Shannon Lee, Annie Dickerson, Lala Fuchs, and Kristina Soltvedt Wiik.