Biography
Mission Statement
Focusing on how art influences the humanities and vice versa, stories can be used as a teaching moment for the tougher times in life. Examining art through Asset Creation and User Experience through storytelling, I want to work on products that combine the two to enable this teaching moment for the audience as an invisible guide.
My quest to further understand how I can participate in storytelling is further explored in Mellon Fellow Research Project:
Teach Yourself About Yourself: Using Storytelling to Re-contextualize Self-actualization
Storyteller in Training
I have found something powerful about storytelling’s power to help people through difficult times and have been searching for a way to participate in it. As a kid, I was drawn to fiction and coming of age tales and the relatability of going through hardship to prove yourself as a child. And as I decided to complete a degree in higher education, I found comfort in listening to peers recount times when their resolve were being tested as they attempted to do the same. Listening or reading, that ability to relate to someone else's plight can light a fire inside of you, an assist or reassurance that one way to deal with hardship is to overcome it.
The ability to participate in storytelling is something I've been trying to figure out for a while. And while there were times that it did not seem like a viable option, what follows is a retelling of experiences in higher education from 2015 through 2021 that helped motivate me into making the decision to pursue it as detailed in my mission statement.
The beginning pt1: The Pressure
Starting with the transition between high school and college in 2015, I had always been torn between deciding whether to commit to a hobby in illustration hoping it would someday turn into a career with no plan or sticking to the safe choice in mathematics and getting a stable job. Fearing the unknown I began studying to become an engineering technician.
I would spend the time in between classes developing illustration skills – being smitten with the chance to one day work with storytelling as a concept artist, I would use all my free time to practice in secret.
The degree was originally supposed to get me a job in a rookie position and make life become easier in terms of having the freedom to pursue what I really wanted with the financial support to make it happen. I graduated at the top of my class and couldn’t get anything.
This wasn’t the plan and I had to come up with something to do to support myself. So, I made the decision to transfer into studying to become an engineer as my illustrations weren’t anywhere near ready to go professional with. And in deciding to pursue something more realistic I made the difficult choice to put away all the progress I had made up to that point in illustration.