Chris Melissinos is a cross-industry technologist and strategic leader who connects bold ideas to what technology makes possible. At Sun Microsystems, as Chief Evangelist and Chief Gaming Officer, he founded the Game Technologies Group and championed the Java developer community, driving the open-source Java gaming stack, including Project Darkstar and bindings for OpenGL, OpenAL, and JInput. He went on to hold executive roles at Verisign and Verizon, leading wide-ranging initiatives across telecommunications and critical internet services. Today, as Principal Evangelist for Amazon on AWS, he partners with senior architects, business units, and executive storytellers to surface Amazon’s most innovative cloud deployments and share what they make possible. As creator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s The Art of Video Games exhibition, he was awarded the Game Developers Choice Ambassador Award, helping establish video games as a celebrated art form. Through it all runs a single conviction: technology’s highest purpose is not to replace what makes us human, but to amplify our creativity, our curiosity, and our capacity to imagine, then build, what comes next.
