During the summer of 2025, I spent six weeks in Medellín, Colombia, completing a Spanish language immersion and a graphic design internship at a full-service creative agency. I contributed to client branding and digital content while deepening my conversational Spanish and my eye for design. The experience gave me a deeper appreciation for Colombian culture, visual storytelling across languages, and the way design speaks differently in different hands.

In the summer of 2026, I continued my Spanish study and began formal French training, a season that closed with a French immersion program in Montréal, Canada. I plan to continue with another immersion program in France in summer 2027. While English is my mother tongue, I learned elementary Mandarin in Singapore, am conversational in Spanish, and am now building fluency in French. My commitment to language is intentional. It supports the cultural experiences and relationships at the heart of how I connect with the world and the people who inspire my work.

Learning languages has taught me to listen closely, noticing the rhythms, gestures, and expressions that make each culture distinct. That awareness flows directly into the characters I create and the way I think about pacing, expression, and emotional honesty in my illustration.

I trained in ballet, contemporary, and jazz dance and performed in musical theatre productions from primary school through high school. That training gave me discipline, rhythm, and a physical understanding of how stories are carried in the body — in posture, gesture, and the energy of a quiet pause. Its influence continues into my life as a college student. When I draw a character mid-motion or in stillness, I am still thinking the way a dancer thinks: weight, breath, and what the body is saying before a word is spoken.

My work lives at the intersection of culture, character, and storytelling. I blend traditional and digital techniques, lean toward warm and expressive color, and am especially drawn to characters who carry their cultural specifics with them. I am currently developing Spell of the South, an original short story I plan to adapt into a comic during my junior and senior studios at CCS, and I continue to grow an original-character universe across illustration and writing. My Creative Writing minor gives me the freedom to develop characters from the inside out — building the interior life first, then finding the visual language to match.