I partner with individuals and collectives across sectors — ranging from higher education, healthcare, digital technology, and community-rooted initiatives — to support work oriented toward critical futures, blending experiential knowledge and lived expertise. My practice centers on building relational infrastructure to sustain imagination, cultivating ecologies of care, crafting dignifying narratives, and stewarding knowledge in reciprocal ways. Through collaborative inquiry and sense-making, I help nurture collective capacity to redistribute power, scale deeper, strengthen community accountability, and transform possibility into sustained practice. If you’re looking for a thoughtful partner to bring an idea to life or deepen work already underway, let’s connect.
Explore what I’ve been up to. . .
Women Designing Their Futures
Creating pathways for growth and reintegration to support system-impacted women in Chicago
WIND (Women Initiating New Directions) is a transformative organization dedicated to empowering women at risk of or with a history of incarceration. Through innovative programs, WIND supports women in designing a thriving life journey by providing them with the resources, strategies, and tools necessary for long-term success and reintegration.
In my role, I provided research and design support, elevating the voices and expertise of Lived Experience Leaders throughout the process. Through a trauma-informed and gender-responsive lens to program design and facilitation, I helped create a safer and empowering space for system-impacted women to reclaim their agency and confidently plan for their futures. Additionally, I supported efforts to synthesize participant feedback and iterate on program components to enhance engagement and impact. To promote sustainability, I contributed to strategies for scaling the program while honoring our commitment to elevating lived experience and sharing power.
Career Cartographies
Exploring how online communities shape youth career navigation and facilitate knowledge sharing
In collaboration with Jobs for the Future, this Youth Participatory Action Research initiative focused on how young people navigate questions of career, identity, and opportunity mediated through digital spaces. This work sought to better map out the evolving role of online networks in shaping academic and professional pathways for young people.
Adopting a digital ethnography approach, I worked alongside a group of youth researchers to better understand how young people cultivate relationships, exchange guidance, and collectively make sense of their futures. My role emphasized responsible engagement with online communities, attending to questions of consent and privacy while grappling with the ethical implications of interpreting publicly available social media data. These insights contributed to a deeper understanding of how institutions might more thoughtfully support youth in navigating career possibilities within an increasingly networked world.
Peak Pathways
Nurturing youth-centered design to build equitable trajectories for college and career readiness
Under the stewardship of Dr. G’s Lab, a trauma-informed design consultancy, we partnered with Peak Education to co-create a digital application supporting youth on their journeys beyond high school.
As a facilitator and youth researcher, I led efforts to establish a care-full and responsible approach for co-design, ensuring students were meaningfully engaged as active collaborators throughout the design process. My role involved capacity-building and mentorship to help students navigate their role as co-designers and shape the design and development of the project. By integrating principles of trauma-informed design with UX methodologies, I helped create a supportive space that amplified students’ voices and prioritized their lived experiences, in service of cultivating shared visions for equitable access to opportunities for personal growth and professional development.
Pedagogies of Possibility
Blending critical artmaking and ethnographic research to forge just educational futures
Over the course of a multi-year engagement, I collaborated with Dr. Shirin Vossoughi’s research lab and MetaMedia—a digital media and maker space advancing creative possibilities for youth—to facilitate an annual 6-week summer program for Black, Latine, South Asian, queer, and trans middle-schoolers, supporting the co-creation of a dignifying and humanizing learning environment rooted in feminist, abolitionist principles.
In this project, I played a pivotal role in guiding the design and research process, leveraging collaborative ethnography and creative, participatory methods. My contributions included mentoring youth participants, facilitating creative workshops, and fostering intergenerational collaboration between artists, educators, and researchers. This work ultimately led to the formation of a pedagogical zines collective to fuse collaborative research and art, creating public community resources to imagine just educational practices.
Condition Confidant
Fostering peer mentorship to cultivate networks of mutual support for personal health management
In partnership with the Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research at Feinberg School of Medicine and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, we launched a pilot program to connect high school students with college mentors to support their transition to managing food allergies independently.
As a design lead, I developed a mentorship framework, informed by community-based research, to enhance the mentor-mentee experience. Additionally, I coordinated logistical workflows, gathered and synthesized participant feedback, and iterated on program components to address emerging needs. To support scaling, I helped create a roadmap to expand the program's reach while preserving its personalized, peer-driven approach.
Digital Health Horizons
Expanding equitable access and reimagining health care through digital transformation
This project led by BCG X focused on transforming patient experiences, through a digital front door strategy, and streamlining operations within a $10M safety-net hospital venture. Working at the intersection of healthcare and technology, the initiative sought to expand equitable access to care by leveraging digital tools to enhance patient engagement and reduce barriers for underserved communities.
As a strategic designer, I conducted ethnographic research to better understand patient and provider needs, collaborated with cross-functional teams to refine digital interventions, and created compelling deliverables to communicate insights to key stakeholders. Through this work, I contributed to a more relational and trauma-informed healthcare ecosystem, driving meaningful community impact.