a (short?) backstory.
Hey, I'm Christina — born and raised in Burlingame, California, right in the heart of the Bay Area. I went to UCLA for Cognitive Science (graduated 2025), and now I'm back up north working in San Francisco. Full circle, kind of. I moved to the city in March of 2026, so it hasn't been too long, but I'm absolutely loving it.
I’ve always been someone who liked making things. I've been drawing since I was about five years old, and my first serious medium was a set of Prismacolor colored pencils, which I somehow got really good at. From there I just kept going — acrylics, brush markers, charcoal, watercolor, basically everything. These days I mostly work digitally in Procreate, but I still grab a pencil and sketchbook whenever I want to keep my analog skills from getting rusty.
For a long time, I thought my path was illustration. Specifically, I wanted to be a splash artist for Riot Games — the kind of person who makes those cinematic character paintings you see in League of Legends. I spent a lot of time studying the styles of Riot and Blizzard, making character art, and trying to get good enough to actually compete for that kind of role.
Eventually I had to be honest with myself: breaking into that field is really, really hard, and I wasn't sure I wanted to dedicate my whole life to pure illustration. So I started asking myself what else I could do with a brain that loved both art and problem-solving.
That's when I found product design — through a club called ProductSpace in my second year at UCLA. It had the visual creativity I'd always loved, but it also scratched this other itch I didn't even know I had: figuring out how things work and why people use them the way they do.
Cognitive science suddenly made a lot of sense as a background for all of it. Turns out studying how people think and perceive the world is pretty useful when your job is designing things for people to actually use.
I'm still an artist, still a little obsessed with game aesthetics, but now I also spend my days thinking about interfaces and experiences. Honestly, it feels like all the same curiosity just pointed at different things. And so far, it's been really fun :)
more creative pursuits.
Earlier last year I picked up a Fujifilm X-T5 and I kind of fell in love with it immediately. It has this film-like quality to the images that makes it feel not overly polished, but not trying too hard. I take it pretty much everywhere now.
I'm still figuring things out, slowly learning new presets and experimenting with my own recipes, but that's part of what makes it fun. My overall approach is pretty simple: I want to capture how people actually live. Not posed, not curated, just real moments and real places. I'm especially drawn to documenting how people go about their day in different parts of the world. And of course, I want to take pictures of my friends and the memories we make in different parts of the world :)
Here are some of my favorites from my trip to Japan.
my bookshelf.
Reading is something I've been trying to do more of in 2026. I try to read a new book on all of my flights or when I'm on the train, and usually I'll opt for realistic fiction and nonfiction, but I like trying out new genres all the time.
I’ve been trying to finish at least one book per month, and so far I’ve been pretty successful. I'd like to join a book club sometime to talk about books with people as a collective, but for now. I'm happy reading them in my own time.
Here are some of my favorites that I’ve read recently.
5/5
a beautiful book about death and purpose
4/5
a short read on the meaning of life and relationships
5/5
what if we could hear the thoughts of an octopus?
5/5
when you're in need of a good, but numbing cry
5/5
fantasy and worldbuilding with a strong female lead
