STATEMENT:

My career has been defined by an ongoing integration of disciplines—architecture, making, education, and communication. I began in architecture, earning a Bachelor's and practicing for four years before pursuing a Master of Architecture at Washington University. While working in the field, I also immersed myself in making, specifically glassblowing, casting, and digital fabrication, providing me a space to explore material processes.

I began graduate school at Washington University intending to become a licensed architect, but soon realized that this path didn’t fully align with my interests. Architects are trained to solve complex problems through design, which I truly enjoy. But I realized I didn’t want just to design—I also wanted to make. For me, the two are inseparable. This realization led me to leave graduate school and move into fabrication work, first at the Field Museum in Chicago and then onto academic making spaces, where I continue to work today.

I’ve been fortunate to work in art and design schools that value making education and see staff as an important part of this equation — first at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and now at Parsons School of Design. While I once worked directly in shops (wood, metal, digital, ceramics), I now co-lead a staffing department at the college level, supporting the teams who run these spaces and helping them navigate relationships with academic leadership and supporting curriculum. In my current position, I’ve done much work building systems to stabilize institutional chaos and shift the community mindset away from crisis thinking or a scarcity mentality to one that investigates a problem through data and advocates for effective change. Like many universities across the country, ours faces significant resource and financial constraints, felt acutely in my department, where limited space makes it challenging to support our user population adequately. My portfolio includes ongoing projects focused on our primary wood and metal shop—a space that is significantly undersized for its user population and serves the widest cross-section of students across all five schools within Parsons. These projects take an investigative, data-informed approach to explore questions such as: Who uses the space, and how? Are users engaging for extended periods or using resource-intensive processes? How might training, access, and spatial organization be restructured to better serve this diverse community? What does the shop truly need to support a broad and evolving curriculum? And ultimately, how can the space be redesigned to function more effectively?

Alongside this work, I’ve maintained a design + making practice centered on functional objects and process-based making. My experience spans wood working, metal working, textiles, casting, in both traditional and digital fabrication methods. Understanding materiality is core to both how and what I create. My portfolio includes examples of this work.  

My interest in data visualization grows from my work at this intersection of design, making, communication, and systems thinking. As part of this program, I’d like to delve into questions such as:

• How can data take physical, spatial, or interactive form?
• How do we move beyond spreadsheets and code to make data empowering, inclusive, and tangible?

• What makes data effective, and how do different learning styles best receive and process it? 
• How can data visualization be used as a learning tool?

As a dyslexic, visually-oriented learner, I relate deeply to these questions. I learn best through visuals, spatial relationships, and hands-on engagement. Data, when well visualized or physicalized, becomes more than information—it becomes processed into knowledge.

Throughout my career, I’ve prioritized equity and inclusion in making spaces. Having spent most of my professional life in male-dominated fields, I understand the need to remove barriers and create access for marginalized populations. As a member of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee for SSMC, a professional organization for shop managers in academia, I work toward more equitable and inclusive academic fabrication spaces. I’ve spoken at conferences on gender and race equity in making, and I plan to carry these values into my graduate work.

In preparation for graduate school, I’ve taken two continuing education courses at Parsons—Data and Analytics for Visualization and  Business Intelligence and Data Visualization Portfolio Development—as part of their certification in Infographics and Data Visualization. These courses have helped me build technical skills in Excel, SQL, and Tableau. I also plan to take a Python course this summer.