September 15, 2026
Dignitas and Epic Games brought the Fortnite Pro-Am Creator Series to the University of Texas at Dallas this summer. Running tournament operations was Raidiant, the women-led production agency that put its own staff to work alongside UT Dallas students rather than around them, supporting diversity in esports programes. The result was a Fortnite exhibition that doubled as a training ground for the next wave of esports production talent.
On July 12, 2026, the University of Texas at Dallas hosted the Dignitas x Epic Games Fortnite Pro-Am Creator Series, a $50,000 Fortnite Reload tournament that paired top pro players with prominent content creators including Clix, Khanada, Ron, Lacy, Jynxzi, Stable Ronaldo, Faxuty, Acorn, and Veno.
The event was staged at UT Dallas’s $18 million Comets LANding Gaming & Esports Center, with a free public watch party on the Student Union Green and a broadcast on AussieAntics’ Twitch channel that pulled in more than 250,000 concurrent viewers online, alongside hundreds of fans who showed up in person to watch on a 300-inch jumbotron.
How Raidiant structured mentorship on the tournament floor
The star power was the draw, but the event’s real significance played out behind the scenes, where UT Dallas students worked alongside industry professionals on broadcast and tournament operations. A big part of making that possible was Raidiant, the women-led esports production and event agency that Epic Games and Dignitas brought in to help run the show, and to make sure the students embedded in it left with something more than a line on a resume.
Four UT Dallas students worked directly with Raidiant as tournament admins and talent managers for the event: Alex Kunz, Angelina Yu, Joshua Galvez, and Arya Gowdar. On the broadcast side, Aaron Khauv served as the primary replay operator, Giovanni Bennett worked camera and audio, and recent graduate Brooke Hudy ran mobile camera. Alex Stenman, UT Dallas’s Facility & Production Coordinator, stepped in as Technical Director to oversee the studio.
For Khauv, the lead-up to the event carried a familiar kind of pressure for anyone stepping into a production this size for the first time. “Leading up to and even throughout the event I was anxious on how we were comparing to the professional standards,” he said. “The longer the event went on, the more I realized how many things we were already doing right. Raidiant, Dignitas and Epic Games staff were super supportive and helped fill in any remaining gaps. They invested a lot of care in making sure we grew with the experience, the amount of staff and resources they brought in was awesome.”
That mentorship-first approach is central to how Joshua Buchanan, UT Dallas’s Gaming & Esports Program Manager, frames the value of the partnership. “We are super thankful to Epic Games, Dignitas and Raidiant for creating opportunities for our students to get hands-on experience working at one of the largest Fortnite events of the year,” Buchanan said. “One of our biggest goals is to develop opportunities for students to get experience working with and learning from industry professionals.”
The Pro-Am wasn’t UT Dallas and Dignitas’s first collaboration. The two worked together last summer on the AussieAntics Mike & Ike Flavor Brawl, which brought 32 top North American Fortnite pros to Comets LANding, along with two YouTube collaborations — “Beat a Fortnite Pro, Win $1,000” and “Fortnite Pros vs. Esports Players Debate” — that have combined for more than 200,000 views. But the Pro-Am Creator Series marked a step up in scale, and Raidiant’s presence on the tournament administration side reflected that: a talent-management misstep or a scheduling error at this event would play out in front of a quarter-million live viewers, not just a campus crowd.
Buchanan sees that added pressure as part of the point. “I’m hopeful that events like the Fortnite Pro-Am Creator Series Dallas are a sign of what’s to come for professional and collegiate esports collaboration,” he said. “These opportunities make so much sense in terms of marketing, sustainability, and talent development for all parties involved.”
The premise driving the program is that students learn esports production by doing it alongside people who already do it professionally, and on that measure, the outcome mattered more than the final bracket.