About

Since childhood I’ve been fixated on understanding people— how they think, what they do, how they make sense of their experiences and how they interact with the objects and spaces in their lives. In my early college days, I studied communication and environmental design— creating installations, objects, and architectures that redefined experiences with the built environment. After that, I pursued graduate study at New York Uinversity’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)— one of the top design programs in the world— where I learned to write code and use physical computing to create interactive art. While at ITP, I made human-dependent cardboard robots, the Tweenbots, that navigated New York City with the help of strangers. They were featured in the Talk to Me Exhibit and the (current) Never Alone Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and are a part of the permanent collection at MoMA.

After ITP, I worked for a number of years for some of New York’s top interactive agencies, designing and producing digital and physical interactive experiences for clients including New York Public Library, The Smithsonian, Bell Labs, Verizon, and many others. From there, I spent a year at Duke University doing research with Dan Ariely, the bestselling author and behavioral economist, where I became skilled at applying behavioral economic theories to design.

After Duke, I co-founded a startup funded by the Knight Foundation for capturing family stories, and began a doctoral degree at NYU at the intersection of the Learning Sciences, Design, and Human Computer Interaction. Specifically, I studied the cognitive/social/cultural/psychological factors affect human learning as well as the design of innovative learning environments. Through my doctoral training, I became a highly skilled qualitative researcher and began consulting for startups on Product Design and how to implement a spectrum of research approaches to gain actionable insights.

In the past few years, I have served as the Head of Product Design for a number of startups, overseeing creative direction and leadership of design teams.  The value that I offer to my clients is in creative problem solving and strategic leadership that helps reduce risk and find opportunities to create greater connection with their customers.  I love to immerse myself in unfamiliar domains, and help clients leverage the power of technology to deliver the right features, with the right user experience, to the right people through humanistic and evidence-based design and research. I currently live in 5 acres in Austin, Texas with my husband and three amazing boys, 3 fur babies, and turtle. I enjoy yoga, cooking, creative making, and just about any activity in nature.