I grew up between worlds: the child of two Buddhists from different cultures, then years spent living and working across Europe and the United States. Music came first. So did movement between languages, disciplines, and ways of seeing.

That movement shaped everything I make. Beneath the nationalities, job titles, and belief systems, I kept returning to something more fundamental: the felt sense of being alive, in a body, in a room, alongside other people.

That’s what I build toward.

My work is in experiential design and production. I build installations, participatory works, and designed encounters for museums, public spaces, conservatories, hospitals, and organizations.

Each project begins with the same question: what conditions make it possible for someone to be genuinely present with themselves and with others?

Some of this work uses technology. Some uses only bodies, rules, and rooms. All of it is grounded in research on emotion, empathy, and constructed experience, and in the belief that art can do more than represent life. It can change how life feels.

I’ve spent years watching people step into lives not their own, and listening carefully to what happens afterward. Thousands of people, across hundreds of organizations, over more than a decade. That experience, together with deep study of social science research on empathy and emotion, led me to a different understanding of what empathy is.

It’s not about understanding. It’s about recognition. Holding someone else’s story as being just as meaningful as your own.

I believe in human flourishing, not abstractly, but as something that can be built one experience at a time. I believe we are capable of more generosity, curiosity, and connection than we usually allow. And I believe carefully designed experiences can help us remember that.

I trained in early music and art song at the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and hold a master’s degree in multimedia design from the Royal Academy of Art in Belgium. 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 founded Sherlocked before turning that same attention toward experiences that build empathy at scale. I now lead Empathable, whose tools are used by organizations including Google, Meta, Deloitte, and Massachusetts General Hospital.