Origin Stories

As a young girl, I watched with fascination as my mother took on the duties of an in-house designer for my father's landscaping business, providing him with stationery, business cards, branded employee t-shirts, and a hand-painted sandwich board featuring the simple tree icon she designed in hunter green to display in our front yard. I’ll likewise never forget the moment I left the theater after seeing The Little Mermaid for the first time at six years old, starry-eyed and brimming with unlikely hopes of working in animation one day. 

As vivid as those childhood dreams may have been, I could not have predicted how far and wide those aspirational sparks would someday fly. Yet it took years before I discovered what role I was destined to play.

From a young age, I often felt polarized — torn between my passion for art and my love for writing. That tension finally dissolved as I sat in the opening lecture of a "Computer Arts" elective course my sophomore more year in college, when I was introduced to the concept of graphic design for the first time. As my soon-to-be-favorite professor described my future trade, my ears and eyes opened and a weight lifted from my chest. I had finally found my calling.

As he so artfully put it, graphic design is the intentional arrangement of images, words, and symbols to convey a given message. Few forms of communication have shaped human civilization so profoundly. From ancient hieroglyphs to vintage propaganda posters to the brand insignias and multimedia messages that surround us today, these layered messages help us satisfy a calling that's uniquely human — the desire to be understood.

As a designer, the multimedia messages and visual artifacts I create can help a business thrive, catapult a cause into the public eye, or support a cinematic story that resonates with someone for a lifetime. Being a career-creative lets me feed my endless curiosity about the human condition: to remain a perpetual student while becoming a temporary expert in an extraordinary range of subjects. Every new project is a chance to immerse myself in an unfamiliar world, to understand more about the people who broadcast and receive each message, and to translate abstract ideas into tangible, clear, and compelling communications.

Career Highlights

While my role there was to help suspend the disbelief of all-age movie goers, I still sometimes find myself in disbelief of the fact that my name will forever roll with the credits of six Pixar films. Of the thousands of graphics I produced during my five years with the animation powerhouse, many have made their way onto merchandise, apparel, billboards, Disneyland rides, art and children’s books, and international gallery walls.

My time as a Pixarian helped me build a unique portfolio of production graphics, and it likewise refined my leadership skills. In a few years’ time, I transitioned from mentee to intern mentor and then instructor, leading several introduction-to-graphic-design workshops through Pixar University, the studio's in-house education program. In my final year, I was elected to be a peer liaison for my art department coworkers — part of a studio-wide group tasked with collecting feedback from various teams, which was then summarized and reported to studio leaders and executives.

Leaving the film industry behind, I joined an award-winning branding and packaging agency as a lead designer, where I collaborated on a variety of high-level design challenges for Fortune 500 companies — including Visa, Coca-Cola, Google, Johnson's, Samsung, Leo Burnett, Xfinity, and Amazon — with a lean team of exceptionally talented designers. While there, I became well versed in the agency's signature strengths, employing a ruthless and refined sense of minimalism to build scalable design systems that distilled each brand, packaging panel, and deliverable into its most essential parts.

Outside the studio setting, I regularly accepted invitations to share my work and philosophies with design hopefuls and enthusiasts. In 2015, both of my alma maters named me Distinguished Alumni of the Year, and I returned to give lectures at each, including a keynote at SCAD's Alumni Weekend. I also took to the podium at UC Berkeley as a visiting speaker and design competition judge, lectured twice at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, was a guest speaker at IDEO in San Francisco, and most recently spoke at The Green School in Bali, Indonesia. 

My writing and reflections on the industry have also found an audience beyond my personal platforms, with excerpts, interviews, and commentary featured in the Los Angeles Times, Variety, Cartoon Brew, and numerous other international publications.