Where I Start
With story
Animation, fiction, and visual worlds taught me to look for meaning beneath the surface.
How I Think
In systems and images
Some problems arrive as diagrams. Some arrive as colors. I like translating between both.
What Stays
A wish to widen the room
I want my work to make space for curiosity, difference, and people who were told to stay practical.
My Story
My interest in animation and fiction started when I was six, and it never really left. I grew up inside animated films, cartoons, anime, manga, webcomics, short films, and illustrated stories from different cultures, languages, art styles, and emotional worlds. I was drawn to the way visual stories could carry history, philosophy, humor, grief, and tenderness all at once.
Before I ever wrote a line of code, I was already making things. Sketching portraits in the margins of notebooks, pressing clay into shapes that surprised me, painting mountain light on cheap canvas. Art was never just a hobby; it was how I learned to pay attention.
That passion was not always treated as something serious where I grew up. Fiction was often dismissed as childish, art as impractical, and success as something measured mostly through grades and approved career paths. In high school, ceramics and graphic novels helped me find that part of myself again. They reminded me that creativity was not a distraction from becoming capable. It was the thing that made me feel fully awake.
When I found computer science, something clicked. Not because the two worlds were the same, but because both demanded the same discipline: be specific about what you mean, and honest about what you don't yet know. I brought the same patience I gave a brushstroke to every function I wrote.
I study Computer Science at NAU, where I have shipped production software, competed in datathons, and led student organizations, all while keeping paint on my hands and clay under my fingernails. What I want to build next is work that stays with people: software that feels as deliberate as a good composition, experiences that carry the same weight as a well-chosen color.
Roots & Lens
Animation as a first language
Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Turkish cartoons, Studio Ghibli, Fortiche, and web artists from many countries shaped how I understand worldbuilding and emotional detail.
Finding people through art
When my surroundings felt closed to difference, online art communities helped me meet people who were curious, imaginative, and serious about visual storytelling.
Building with empathy
As the daughter of two educators, and through teaching younger students in volunteer work, I learned how much patience, clarity, and encouragement can change a person's horizon.
Artist statement
I make things that ask to be seen.
Some rooms only permit one voice. I grew up in that kind of quiet, where certain thoughts learned to vanish before they could become words, and where the safest currency was conformity. What I carried out of those years wasn't bitterness. It was a very precise need: to find spaces where difference is invited in rather than managed out, and to make things that do the same.
Art came first. Ceramics, paint, charcoal: working with my hands was how I practiced having a perspective before I had the confidence to defend it. It taught me patience and a deep suspicion of shortcuts: that honest work doesn't rush to resolve its tensions, and that the most important choices happen quietly, before any audience arrives.
Computer science asked the same question from a different angle: what are you trying to say, and what is the most precise shape for it? I found I could bring everything from a studio to every function I wrote: the same care for structure, the same stubbornness about craft. Code and clay turned out to be different dialects of the same language.
Everything in this portfolio is that conversation made visible. The ceramics and the software, the data visualizations and the paintings, each one an attempt at work that earns a second look. Work that opens the room, for anyone who was ever told their way of seeing was too much, or not the right kind of enough.
Read the poem that started thisHow I Make
I start before the screen.
My best decisions happen before anything is built: in the sketchbook, in the space between a problem and a first response, in the moment a shape or a color makes something suddenly legible. I move between intuitive and structural thinking as two halves of the same process. The art teaches me where to look. The engineering teaches me how to make it hold.
You've reached the end
Thank you for being here.
This is where code meets clay, where functions are drafted with the same care as a brushstroke, and every page carries something real. I hope something here stayed with you.
Let’s make something worth seeing.