I grew up between worlds. The child of parents from different cultures and different corners of the world, I was born in Queens and carried by curiosity through New Haven, San Francisco, Hamburg, The Hague, Amsterdam, Charlottesville, and Brooklyn. Each place a different language, a different way of being. I trained as an opera singer and as an experiential artist, studied multimedia design, learned to speak five languages (English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, and the Flemish dialect), and kept returning to the same question: what makes people come alive in the presence of each other?

That movement shaped everything I make. Beneath the nationalities, the job titles, the belief systems, there is something more fundamental. The felt sense of being alive, in a space, alongside other people.

That's what I build toward. Encounters informed by social science and designed with the goal of increasing our capacity for experiential flourishing together.

From co-founding one of the most celebrated boutique experiential studios in Amsterdam, to designing walk-in-their-shoes experiences in which over 15,000 people have inhabited lives not their own, the through-line has always been the same.

Every moment holds more than we let it. Experience is subjective. It is, in a sense, a fiction we each construct. The work is about expanding that fiction. Helping people feel the full experiential potential of a given moment, while remaining comfortable with its subjectivity, and leaving room for everyone around them to flourish in their own.

That's what I design toward. Not a single shared experience, but a shared expansion of what experience can be.

I was raised by two Buddhist parents from different cultures and corners of the world. One was a Zen master and psychotherapist. The other was a teacher's aide for children with disabilities in the New York City public school system. Both spent their lives attending to the interior worlds of others in deeply concrete ways. That shaped me more than anything else.

I love humans. Genuinely and without much reservation. And because of that, I am consistently moved by how often we fall short of each other. Not out of malice. Out of distance. Out of the categories and borders we build between ourselves, categories that stop us from feeling the full vividness of what any given moment could be.

My medium is unperformance. The deliberate removal of the social scripts we enact automatically, the beliefs and motivations that quietly govern our interactions without our awareness. Spaces where those fall away. Where people can cultivate something more essential: their own emotional intelligence, their capacity for genuine contact with another person, and the emotional contagions that ripple outward from that.

There is a particular territory of experience I find most compelling, where depth and scale coexist without sacrificing each other. That territory is largely unexplored. It is where I work.

My artistic career began at seven, singing with the Trinity Choir of Men and Boys in New York City. Those years, combined with performing at the Metropolitan Opera between the ages of ten and thirteen, gave me my first 10,000 hours. I sang alongside artists like Domingo and Pavarotti at the tail end of a golden era of Belcanto singing. From there I trained in early music and art song at the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and pursued a master's degree in multimedia design at the Royal Academy of Art in Belgium. I co-founded a boutique experiential design studio in Amsterdam, which showed me the potential of the commercial side of experience, before turning that same attention toward experiences that build empathy at scale.

I was Design Lead at Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's Interdisciplinary Affective Science Lab at Northeastern University, where I developed a research-based approach to experiential design. I now lead Empathable, whose work has been used by organizations including Google, Meta, Deloitte, Harvard Medical School, UVA, and Dartmouth. I was a Byron Fellow in 2019.

Harvard Medical School on increasing Affirming Patient Care through Experiential learning.

Society for Neuroscience and Creativity on Experiential methods in scientific experiments.

The Darden School of Business, on ‘Designing the Empathic Ethnographic Interview’.

WillowTree Apps, on Depolarizing the Conversation on Advocacy in DEI

Ford Motor Company, ‘How we can make radical change without changing the radicals’.

Asian American Bar Association, on ‘How empathy builds resilience’.

Triangle Organization Development Network, (on Empathy in the face of biases)

University of Virginia, Department of Engineering on ‘Human Centered Design Thinking.’

University of Virginia, Design Thinking Class ‘Building Professional Life around Values’.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, on ‘Experience Ideation and Empathic Design’.

Robins Graduate School of Business, University of Richmond, on 'Experience Innovation’ (2020) & Empathic Leadership (2025).

University of Amsterdam (De Vrijeacademie), on ‘Intergroup collaborative experiences’.

Charlottesville Design Week on de-categorizing personality types.

Keynote Speaker at San Francisco’s Social Capital Conference (SOCAP) - Impact Accelerator 2019, on empathic choice making with designing with a sense of connection.

Keynote Speaker for Pensions and Investments Annual ESG Conference 2022 on ‘Belonging and the Bottom Line.’

Keynote Speaker for Sensata - DEI Conference 2022 on ‘How we can create courageous collaboration without being discouraged.’

Speaker at TEDX Oneonta 2022 - How we can make Radical Change without Changing the Radicals.

Education First 2023, on ‘How empathy impacts SEL’ at their Social Emotional Learning in Action Conference.