I am a mom, a design leader, and an artist. Most recently, I led design at Nextdoor. Art, textiles, and teaching inspire my creative practice. In the past, I’ve taught in the MFADT program at Parsons, designed textiles, hiked the Salkantay trail, and lived in Delhi, Hollywood, and Berkeley.

April 2024
These days, I am:

Using AI to create visuals that tell stories;
Making poetic animations using Figma and other tools;
Learning to speak Italian on Duolingo;
Writing on my Substack

Created by me using Figma

How I lead →

Take a peek into my methodologies as a design leader and designer

Head of Design at Nextdoor
12/20 - 01/23

Led Design for Neighbors
Grew happy teams
Shipped 0-1
Envisioned the Future
Connected Dots
Designed for Delight

View Highlights → 

Director of Product Design at Figure Eight
(acquired by Appen)
09/18 - 12/20

Designed tools that enable ML
Shipped 0-1
Built a Design System
Designed for Delight
Learned the nuts and bolts of AI

View Highlights →

In the Past

UX Director at IBM iX
03/16-06/18

I led UX at the NYC iX studio while designing with AI, Blockchain and partnering with clients such as Coca Cola, Marriott

UX Director at Publicis
2/12-03/16

I led UX for Citi products including a redesign of thankyou.com, and massmoca.org

Creative Technologist at CNN
08/2012 - 12/2012

I partnered with editors, and journalists to find data that told stories and designed, and coded interactive visualizations for cnnmoney.com

Other Stuff

During my MFA at Parsons, I learned to code to turn ideas into prototypes. I turned the news into patterns, built an algae-inspired synthesizer using motion and light sensors, a time-traveling remote, and visualizations that responded to sound or mimicked the flocking of starlings

For my thesis, I translated traditional weaving practices into current interfaces. Ask me about it :)

Summer Somewhere is a space I created to collaborate with block printers and weavers from India. I designed the brand/identity, website and art-directed and styled the photos. Behnaz Babazadeh shot the beautiful pictures. A block-printed scarf was the first manifestation of the idea.

I sketch and paint to tease out the essence of a single source of inspiration. Working with my hands and making art are core to my creative practice.

Brooklyn Diary, a beautiful book curated by Lena Corwin, features artists' studios, local favorites, art and photography from Brooklyn. I took photos of the Saipua studio for the book, using an old Minolta film camera that I've been shooting adventures with since 2008.

And an adventure for you to see while you are here

In Summer '14 we hiked the Fimmvörðuháls trail in Iceland. We were slightly apprehensive of finishing the trek in one day but managed to trek the 16 miles in 8.5 hrs despite the mostly very uncooperative weather. So worth it too. It definitely felt like one of the most dramatic one day hikes I've ever done.

And after hours and hours of walking through the most 'no man's land' looking scenery, the view opened onto what we dubbed 'happy valley', so called for the vibrant arctic flowers, clear skies, and hope that we will make it back in time for the last bus.

The mars-looking part of the trail goes through lava fields from the 2010 eruption at Eyyafyallayökül. The storm at this point made the scenery so desolate, walking very tough and the trail markers so hard to find. There were lava fields and snow on the part of the trail aptly called 'The Ashtray'.