A product designer who came to design the long way — through stages, cameras, and screenplays.
Bilingual designer based in San Diego. My path wound through acting, visual art, photography, and film — but every stop was really about the same thing: telling stories, and understanding how people feel.
A stage, a camera, a screenplay, a screen — different tools, one pursuit: to tell a story, and make someone feel understood.
It started on a stage. In high school I acted in productions, and somewhere between memorizing lines and trying to understand my characters, I fell for storytelling — making someone feel something, and the empathy it takes to step into a life that isn't yours. I didn't know it yet, but that instinct — start by understanding the person in front of you — is the exact one I now build every design around.
From there I chased the feeling through mediums. I started with physical art — charcoal, pen stippling, oil pastels — which taught me patience and the slow work of getting something just right. When I found photography, I leaned all the way in; it trained my eye for composition and how a single frame can carry a whole mood. That instinct pulled me to the screen: as a huge America's Next Top Model fan, I started compositing anime and cartoon characters into new worlds in Photoshop — fan-made "cycles," my own version of the show. I found a whole YouTube community doing the same thing, and I leveled up trying to out-do them — teaching myself Illustrator and chasing edits so clean you couldn't see the seams. Without realizing it, I was building the foundation I use every day now — the tools, and an obsessive eye for the details that make a piece feel finished.
In undergrad I studied film, focused on screenwriting. Structuring a story taught me to think in sequence — how you move someone through a beginning, a middle, and a payoff, shaping what they feel at each step. It's the same muscle I use now mapping how a person moves through a product: every screen is a scene, every flow is an arc.
Then one day a YouTube "day in the life of a UX designer" stopped me cold — storytelling, problem-solving, and people, all in one job. That was it. I devoured everything UX I could find and enrolled in a design bootcamp. While I was in it, I tutored math as a teaching assistant, which turned out to be its own kind of design: taking something dense and making it click for someone. That's still the part I love most. Today I design products, still doing what I found on that stage — just with new tools: understanding people, and making them feel understood.
Led research and redesigned an accessible, mobile-first resource hub for 15,000+ members.
Owned the service-discovery architecture for a 55-program community resource app.
Designed a website for a creative-education startup using comic-making and AI tools, leading UX direction and the research behind CEO-level recommendations.
Whether it's a role, a project, or a good design problem — I'd love to hear from you. Or honestly, just to recommend me a movie; I keep a running list and I take it very seriously.