Now
I lead tech culture strategy at Intuit, where I design the programs that teach a 9,000-person technology organization to build with AI. That means Global Engineering Days, a twice-yearly innovation sprint across 13 global sites, a workshop program with thousands of live sessions, executive keynotes, and the year-round work of making a very large company feel like a place where builders get permission to invent. I also chair the board at Gray Area, the San Francisco nonprofit where art and technology have been colliding for two decades.
How I got here
I come from a long line of Mexican artists and craftsmen, and I got my start in experimental theater, building imagined worlds with whatever was on hand. That instinct carried me through an MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons, a decade of games, wearables, and interactive installations, and to founding the Emoji Foundation, whose Emoji Dictionary has served millions of people translating the written word into a pictorial one. Along the way I taught at Parsons, the University of San Francisco, and St. Joseph's College, ran education and the artist incubator as Creative Development Director at Gray Area, and designed a machine learning hackathon with Google Research's Magenta team called BitRate.
What drives it
Every project on this site is the same project: teaching people to make things with technology. There's a moment I chase. Someone who swore they weren't technical, weren't creative, weren't a builder, gets something working for the first time, and their whole face changes. I've seen it under the lights of a black box theater. I've seen it when a teenage girl ships her first game and can't stop grinning. I've seen it when an engineer twenty years into her career tests an idea with a real customer and comes back glowing like it's day one. The tools keep changing, soft circuits to emoji to AI agents, but the tools were never the point. The point is designing the moment so well that trying feels safe, experts feel reachable, and permission feels real. Do that, and people who never called themselves builders start building things nobody saw coming. Twenty years in, that moment still gets me every time. It never gets old.
Highlights
NASA Space Apps Challenge global winner, for Senti8, a scent-memory wristband for astronauts
IndieCade Award finalist, for the pervasive game Find Maria Rivera
1M+ visitors to the Emoji Dictionary in a single quarter
Immersive experiences for Google, Apple, and Intuit; social impact work with the Goethe Institut, Buckminster Fuller Institute, and Leonardo
Curation at Miami Art Basel with Regenaissance and at the Oslo Freedom Forum
Press and mentions
My work has been featured by Wired, CBS, Yahoo Tech, Make Magazine, the San Francisco Examiner, and Adafruit, among others. More on the press and news page →
Teaching
Fifteen years of classrooms, from graduate seminars to game design bootcamps for teenage girls. More on the teaching page →
Education
MFA, Design and Technology, Parsons School of Design (Provost's Scholarship, University Scholars Award)
MA and MFA, Experimental and Activist Performance, New College of California
BA, Theater, UC Santa Cruz
Closing
Want to build something, book a talk, or compare tarot decks?