I Design the
Conditions for
Creativity
I'm a designer, facilitator, artist, and community architect. I've spent 15+ years designing experiences and holding space for people to think, reflect, and build together.
Working on something? Start a conversation →
Sensemaking
I help orgs, individuals, and teams to slow down in efforts to understand what's happening and why it matters. This looks like strategic consulting, research synthesis, and thinking-partner work.
Community Architecture
I design the systems, rituals, and practices that make a community feel meaningful, intentional, supported, and connected.
Learning Design
I design cohorts, class learning journeys, and workshops built to draw out reflection, creativity, and connection. At the center of my craft are core design principles: Creativity, Integration, Agency, Strucutre, Reflection, and Connection.
Facilitation
I have a deep love for being the conductor, storyteller, or meaning maker of a space. I'm brought in to hold a room for retreats, intensives, and designed experiences. I can design the experience, facilitate it, or step in mid-stream.
Visual Design
With 22 years of independent learning in visual design, I love creating presentations, brand systems, decks, keynotes, printed materials, and digital artifacts. I love thinking expansively about materials, form factors, and messagining to make meaningful and fun things that people can hold or think with!
Graphic Facilitation
Live sketchnoting and visual storytelling. I help turn complex ideas into legible ones, and leave people with something that's both beautiful and interesting to reflect with. This includes meeting maps (think about all those sticky notes and actually doing something with them!), Visual Reports, and Graphic Notes.
Virtual Events
I spent 7 years designing the anti-webinar experience (FieldTrips!) tinkering with how to make online events feel human, connected, and impactful. I help you design and run sessions that feel surprising and alive.
Team Experiences
Workshops and gatherings for teams — fun, focused, useful. Offsites, kickoffs, or recurring rituals where people reconnect and think together.
My approach to work is
Collaborations create energy, momentum, and meaning for everyone involved. Ideas are grounded in reality but generated with imagination and an expansive sense of possibility.
Projects evolve through experimentation, reflection, and iteration. Many times we will not know if something will "work," but the method behind the mystery is always there. Experiment, Reflect, Tinker, Repeat.
I believe in developing systems that are shaped with people's lived experiences at the center. My design methods start and end with people. I use AI as a tool that supports and enables our creativity without replacing it.
I hold a high standard of rigor, craft, and clarity in my work. I also believe in the beauty of mistakes, and the power of just trying a thing. Keeping that balance alive is what supports creativity and emergence.
Kindness, respect, grace, and flowing with challenges are critical to making impactful work and having healthy, generative collaborations. I will always approach conflict with this spirit. Feedback is always grounded in a "how can we grow from this?" posture.
The world is bigger than work. I keep this in mind through all of my projects and I make space for others to do the same. We're all doing our best out here.
Case Studies and Collabs
"How do you design an online learning ecosystem where people feel connected, inspired, and engaged in learning together?"
Designed the community architecture for CreativeMornings FieldTrips, a large-scale virtual learning program designed to help people gather, make, and learn together online. I created the host and participant experience, supported facilitators, curated hundreds of sessions, and built the systems, rituals, and resources that made the program feel welcoming, thoughtful, and alive.
Chapter Refresh
"How do you refresh a global chapter ecosystem so volunteers have more clarity and easier access to the onboarding, support, and resources they need?"
Led a redesign of the community strategy and systems for CreativeMornings' global chapter network across 200+ cities. I supported multiple internal teams, shaped chapter-facing programs and communications, redesigned onboarding and handover processes, and worked to make the ecosystem more connected, sustainable, and human at scale.
Design Council
"How do you help shift a community from a talk-based format to a participatory one where learners are treated as active agents?"
Created and facilitated participatory learning experiences for CreativeMornings hosts who wanted to experiment with new event formats and ideas, particularly in relationship to AI. The Design Council invited hosts into the role of co-designer, giving them space to test concepts, learn from one another, and build confidence in participatory leadership.
"How do you turn ideas about gathering into a live learning experience people can feel, practice, and move through together?"
Co-designed the first community experience for Priya Parker's Live Labs, translating her ideas into a participatory container people could move through together via Zoom and Slack. I helped shape the structure, rhythms, and connection points — both synchronous and asynchronous — so the experience felt alive, relational, and reflective of the principles.
"How do you build the systems, partnerships, and operational support a growing public art project needs while protecting the intimacy that makes it matter?"
I support the operations, partnerships, and long-term infrastructure behind Brandon Doman's ongoing public art project collecting handwritten stories from strangers. My work helps create the conditions for the project to grow with care, reach new audiences, and stay grounded in the intimacy that makes it matter.
"How do you create a community model that helps educators gather around creative learning in ways that are local, peer-driven, and connected to a larger shared practice?"
Helped design and support a community model that brought educators together around creative learning, play, and making with Scratch. The work focused on creating the conditions for local meetup leaders to host meaningful experiences, share what they were learning, and feel part of something larger than a single event.
"How do you make the invisible visible — turning the ideas, energy, and meaning inside a room into something people can hold, revisit, and share?"
I organize materials and ideas visually during live experiences and after the fact, creating artifacts, reports, and presentations that make information more digestible and a little more magical to experience. Whether I'm capturing a keynote in real time or synthesizing a multi-day retreat into a single visual map, the goal is always the same: help people see what they've built together. Clients have included Ford Foundation, Harvard GSE, and Urbano Project.
"How do you help people stay oriented, connected, and engaged across an eight-day startup incubator?"
At Decelera's eight-day incubator in Menorca, I served as the emcee and storytelling thread across the full experience. I helped participants track the larger arc of the program by bridging sessions, framing transitions, and reflecting back the ideas and patterns emerging along the way. Through live synthesis and thoughtful facilitation, I helped transform a complex sequence of moments into an experience that felt cohesive, grounded, and meaningful.
"How do you build a circle-based community that holds members through a structured cohort journey while leaving room for real connection and emergence?"
Partnered with Skopos Collective to build their circle experience and design the cohort journey at the heart of it. The work shaped how members move together through the program — the rhythms, rituals, and container that make the circles feel grounded, intentional, and worth showing up for week after week.
In Practice
is Creative
Annual celebration of NYC creativity. 20 speakers, 90 seconds each, a crowd of 200+ cheering them on.
Co-designed with Annie Yi
I love that comics are an accessible medium of expression for people of any age. Beanverse is a universe of beans I began working on in 2012, plus the looser collection of paintings, sketches, and studies I do in my free time :)
Workshops
A 4-part virtual series on designing impactful workshops, created for a CreativeMornings partnership with Adobe Express. 1k live attendees across the series.
for Learning
by Creating
I spent four years as a teaching fellow and experience designer at Harvard GSE, translating weekly texts into activations that helped learners integrate ideas in playful, meaningful, and surprising ways.
Ai
A facilitated conversation for 250 people at CreativeMornings NYC, surfacing questions, concerns, excitements, and ambiguities around emerging AI technology.
Co-designed with Tina Roth Eisenberg
Guide
A peer-to-peer resource library for people who design intentional gatherings. Each guide surfaces the mechanics, personal touches, and inspiration behind a real gathering so you can learn from it, remix it, and make it your own.
Notes
I organize materials and ideas visually during live experiences and after the fact, creating artifacts, reports, and presentations that make information more digestible and a little more magical to experience.
Kickstarter
A 4-part series to get into The Artist's Way with community around you, guest artists, and practices to fuel your own creative work.
Brand system and educator community for Harvard's Creative Computing Lab. I designed the visual identity for the lab and grew the global ScratchEd Meetup Network from 7 to 42 active chapters.
Love Notes
This is a live collection of voice notes and written messages from people I've worked with, made things with, and learned alongside.
How to use the machine: Select a message, then press the play button on the machine to hear it — or press leave a message to leave one of your own! Note: Playback does NOT work on mobile!
↓ Instructions
"Exa I have no idea how to do this!" That's ok!! You can talk directly to me, or to someone else about me — whatever feels natural. A few ways to start:
- "Hi Exa! If someone asked me what it was like working with you, I'd say…"
- "Hi Exa! Something we made together that I'm really proud of is…"
- "Working with Exa was…"
- "If you're thinking about working with Exa, here's what you should know…"
Truly though, whatever you say is awesome...we're going for experimental first drafts! You can also just say hi. Just keep it to no longer than 2 minutes (I won't cut you off but I may clip the audio file in post).
I know you want to hear this message, but if you do, you'll record it 100 times and you don't need to spend that much time here!)
(you can also just text me an audio message if that's what you want to do :P)
↓ Instructions
Hi there! Your note will show up as a post-it on the answering machine (after I approve it). Please keep your message under 550 characters. Here are a few prompts that might help you…
- What was it like attending a workshop I led?
- If you've worked with me before, what do you think my strengths are? What about our work together felt meaningful or impactful?
- What should people know about me?
Thank you for taking the time to share your reflections as a testimonial. I'm so grateful! I hope it's a fun exercise!
I review everything before it goes live — thank you for taking the time to leave a message.
If you're looking to collaborate or connect, reach out →
Let's make something
impactful
I'm currently available for consulting, facilitation, workshop design, and collaborative projects. If you have something you'd like support on: an event, a community, a tool, a workshop. I'd love to hear about it.
Reach Out →