If you walked into my house on any given day, you'd find a design studio disguised as a living room: vintage garments mid-transformation, a DJ controller blinking beside AI sketches, and my dog Baby asleep on a pile of fabric scraps. My work has always lived at the overlap of creativity, technology, and human behavior.

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I grew up as the youngest of three daughters. My mother founded charter schools built on hands-on learning long before "design thinking" had a name. My father was diagnosed with Parkinson's at twenty-eight, before I was born. His tremor and careful movements were constants of my childhood, so familiar I assumed they were simply how fathers were. It wasn't until college that research revealed what my family had never been told: the drinking water on the Air Force bases where he grew up was contaminated with chemicals linked to early-onset Parkinson's. The system designed to protect him had failed him.

That discovery shaped everything. Systems fail people quietly, and their failures compound across generations in ways that stay invisible until someone decides to look. My father's daily struggle became my first lesson in what happens when design doesn't account for the people it's supposed to serve.

Sociology at UCLA gave me language for what I'd always felt. The music industry taught me that powerful ideas meet people where they are. Education showed me how often traditional structures overlook learners who don't fit neatly inside them.

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Growing up neurodivergent, I spent years decoding social rules others seemed to receive automatically. For a long time, I thought that disconnect was my fault. Eventually, I realized it was a design flaw, not a personal one. Like my father's Parkinson's, my neurodivergence positioned me as someone who experiences design failures in the body, daily. That understanding ties all my paths together.