I’m a professor at the School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin among the pecan trees of the blackland praries. My data visualization work interrogates how to design for livability in the midst of climate crisis and injustice.

Escaping from the captivity of extractive data visualization trends, my research practice, Feral Data Visualization, builds theories and practices for designing data for livability. Feral data visualization demands an embrace of place-based, situated, embodied, vegetized, and feral forms of visual pattern making that de-estrange us from ecological and social community.

My work has been featured in the Museum of Human Achievement, IEEE Vis Arts Program, Eyeo Festival, and has been longlisted in the 2023 Information is Beautiful Awards. I hold a Master of Design in Design for Interactions from Carnegie Mellon University.

Feral Data Visualization emerged from my MDes thesis at Carnegie Mellon University, Tsuga Convictio, mentored by Molly Steenson and Daragh Byrne. The project interrogates how to re-center the embodied, situated nature of data though an experimental data visualization that supports reflective community conversations. As a result, I discovered fluid, feminine, and ecological ways to create – and (re)enchant – data visualizations.

During my time at Carnegie Mellon University, I joined Kyuha Shim’s Type Lab, a multidisciplinary design research lab at CMU, specializing in computational design and visual communication. I explored experimental forms of data capture under the mentorship of Nica Ross and Golan Levin at the Studio for Creative Inquiry.

Meanwhile, I became permaculture design certified and volunteered as a land steward at Garfield Community Farm, getting to know the local bioregion through contributing to community resiliency.

Before Carnegie Mellon, I spent time in industry exploring my interest in data visualization at the National Institute of Standards and technology, creating a tool to visualize the trade-offs between usability and security of randomly generated passwords. I moved on to study design principles of data visualization for NIST’s Data Science Evaluation platform.

Before NIST, I graduated suma cum laude with a B.A. in Emerging Media and Communication and a minor in Software Engineering from The University of Texas at Dallas. While there, I created a tool for visualizing poetry called Poetry Ribbons as my honors capstone and visualized networks of spam Twitter users. I also founded the first UX club on campus, assisted at the ArtSciLab at the inception of Creative Disturbance, and created award-winning designs and editorial cartoons  (1, 2, 3) for the student newspaper, The Mercury.