When my daughter came home from school on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, she asked a question I wasn't expecting.

​

"Mom, if White people drank from one water fountain and Black people drank from another, what did the Asians drink from?"

​

As the parent of a daughter adopted from China, I realized I didn't have an answer. More importantly, I realized I had never thought to ask the question myself.

​

That moment stayed with me.

​

It made me wonder how people find themselves in stories that don't seem to include them, and how education can help us better understand experiences beyond our own. Those questions ultimately led me to pursue a Ph.D. in Media Psychology, where I began exploring how storytelling, psychology, and technologies influence learning, perspective-taking, and social understanding.

​

My background in visual storytelling gave me one perspective. More than two decades designing environments for commercial productions taught me how stories can shape emotion and attention. Research gave me another. Together, they continue to shape my work today.

 

Whether developing civic learning initiatives, investigating immersive media, or collaborating on educational research, I remain interested in a simple idea: the most meaningful learning experiences don't just provide facts, they invite us to see ourselves, one another, and the world differently.