I was born in the 20th Century in Connecticut, USA. In 2018, I traded the rocky beaches of Long Island Sound for the glory that is the Rocky Mountains, and obviously have never looked back.
I graduated with my bachelor’s in literature in 2013. My first job was as the in-house marketing and technical writing admin for a software testing company, my first introduction to the tech industry. I spent a few years primarily focused on technical writing, after which I decided I needed something with more soul than white papers and instruction manuals.
I found Instructional Design via the hospitality industry as an Operations & Training Analyst at a 3rd-party hotel management company in 2016. In 2019, after moving to CO, I decided to transition into tech more fully. I began as a QA tester at a well-respected startup called Craftsy, where I got to use my technical writing and operations skills while binging crafting videos. It wasn’t my dream job, but it was my dream company. Unfortunately, our parent company shut Craftsy down at the beginning of the pandemic.
I spent the rest of the pandemic working for a tech bootcamp company as a Lead Instructor for User Experience Design bootcamps. When I started experiencing burnout from the schedule and extremely high physical and emotional demands of the role, I decided to go back to what I knew, and returned to Instructional Design in the hospitality management industry. Unfortunately, the burnout turned into Long Covid (and fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, POTS, and a whole slew of related co-morbidities), and a year and a half later I had to leave the workforce completely. Working highly demanding jobs during a never-ending global pandemic will have that effect on a person.
While I continue to manage my disability, I have embraced my artist era, dabbling in textile arts like sewing and embroidery, as well as painting and digital art. As an artist, my work is inspired by nature, my disability, and society, specifically the effect of late-stage capitalism on the neurodivergent queer experience.
My ultimate career goal is to be an art director for learning programs. I am currently pursuing a Computer Graphics certificate from Arapahoe Community College to learn the Adobe suite, which I am using to build a graphic design portfolio that shows my visual storytelling and ability to communicate visually across multiple programs, projects, and disciplines.