My Journey
I am a design researcher and social impact strategist with an intentionally nonlinear path shaped by years of traveling, listening, caregiving, and creativity. Before earning my MA in Design, I documented human stories through journalism in Oregon and Cuba, created EdTech content in Cape Town, bicycled across America, supported small businesses and nonprofits with heartfelt marketing, helped open a restaurant in upstate NY, backpacked around the globe, cared for families navigating illness, and trained in somatic work. These experiences taught me to honor both the emotional and systemic layers of human life, and they now shape how I approach research, co-design, and systems transformation. Most recently, I co-created and implemented an employee well-being program in a cancer center, weaving together qualitative research, co-design, environmental design, and storytelling to support oncology staff. I bring this constellation of lived experience, rigorous inquiry, and embodied compassion to projects in healthcare, education, mental health, and community well-being.
Design Philosophy
I believe that design is fundamentally about relationships between people, (eco)systems, and possibilities that emerge when care is centered. My practice is grounded in narrative storytelling and honors the complexity of human experience while making systems more accessible, equitable, and humane. I use relational practices and generative co-design to cultivate trauma-responsive spaces for resonant design solutions to emerge.
Vision & Goals
Like the seeds in my Design Mind Zine, I turn to leaders in the space of design justice for guidance. I am committed to continuous learning, embracing uncertainty, unlearning embedded systems of oppression, and co-creating better futures. I am interested in working with the “taboo” within slow-moving complex systems like healthcare, education, and mental health—spaces where thoughtful design has the greatest potential to transform lives and systems from the inside out.
UX Research • Design Research • Copywriting • Brand Design • Marketing • Storytelling
9+ years in communications, marketing, customer service, sales, events, and creative
MA in Design, Carnegie Mellon University, 2025
BA in Journalism & Advertising, University of Oregon, 2016
LUMA Human Centered Design Practitioner Certificate, 2024
IDEO Design Thinking Certificate, 2024
Pronouns
She/Her/Hers
My application video to Carnegie Mellon Prior to my Design MA
Life Wisdom:
Bicycling across America: There is beauty in the uncharted path. People are kind. Going slow is healing. Presence is a practice.
Traveling around South America and Europe: When you move from your heart, doors open. Curiosity and humility invite magic. Nature is our greatest teacher.
Facing my Fear of Singing A capella: Being vulnerable is contagious and gives others permission to do the same.
Climbing Mt. Whitney: Always come prepared, there is still joy in suffering. The journey is better than the view.
Working as a Night Nanny: Life is fragile. Interdependence is sacred. Tenderness is intelligence.
Training as a Body Worker: The body always tells the truth and holds our deepest form of knowing. Trust transforms systems.
Learned Wisdom—Quotes from Teachers:
“When we epistemologically open up our understanding of knowledge beyond mainstream, institutional knowledge to include experiential, cultural, embodied, aesthetic, and spiritual knowledge, the definition of research as ‘investigation’ is transformed to a pluriverse of definitions…Likewise, the purpose of research is transformed from ‘to establish fact or reach a conclusion’ to a pluriverse of purposes: to survive, teach history, share values, do justice, answer a question, resist, leave a legacy, transform society, pass down culture, steward a system, etc.”
—Victor Udoewa
“It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening, not of closure.”
―Tim Ingold, Being Alive
“Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves–how do I learn from this?”
—adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy
“Feeling is revolutionary, a disruption of the status quo. Though it feels personal and happens in our bodies, it doesn't need to be a solitary action. Feeling and connection bring us into the world and into relationship with one another. Some things seem too big to be felt alone because they are. They require the collective to hold the space for big feeling, for it to move through, and to remind us that we’re not alone.”
—Prentis Hemphill
“When we listen deeply we begin to uncover what wants to be brought into awareness. We become receptive and permeable to sources of wisdom that lie beyond the purely human. Listening is the art of reverence...
Restraint offers a breath, a pause, a moment of reflection, which allows things to be revealed. Not knowing reminds us that we live in mystery; an ever unfolding, unshaped moment. Not knowing, situates us at the edge of discovery.
Letting go of control, outcomes and certainty softens the space between us and all the others with whom we share this shimmering world.”'—Francis Weller, In the Absence of the Ordinary
“The beauty of the partnership is that each plant does what it does in order to increase its own growth. But as it happens, when the individuals flourish, so does the whole…The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. In reciprocity, we fill our spirits as well as our bellies.”
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
“Slowing down is not a function of speed, it’s a function of awareness and I don’t want to make awareness a mental construct. It’s a function of presence.”
"Just like trees, we only grow where we are the most vulnerable. Meeting ourselves and each other at the edge of comfort, befriending our cracks, we allow the emergence of the new."
—Báyò Akómoláfé