I design products that teach.
I teach teams to design better.
Hi, I'm Emily — a UX and learning experience design leader with over a decade of work at the intersection of technology and education.
I started my career as a painter and printmaker, which is still how I see the world: in relationships between things, in the space between elements, in what you leave out as much as what you put in. That sensibility followed me into UX, into learning design, into the way I build teams, and into the way I think about what it means to make something genuinely useful for another person.
Most of my career has been in ed tech and higher education, building digital products that help people learn — and building the teams and processes that make that work sustainable. I've led teams of 24+, managed multi-million dollar budgets, launched first-of-kind products, and sat at tables from Google's engineering leadership to university boards of trustees. I've also personally written vision narratives at 10pm, jumped into Figma to unblock a designer, and gone back to school myself when I realized I had a skills gap I needed to close.
That last part matters to me. I don't believe in leading from a distance.
I got into this work because I believe design can be a form of care.
When a student navigating online college for the first time can find exactly the support they need without hunting through three different systems — that's design as care. When a working adult can complete a micro-credential on their lunch break in a format that actually respects how they learn — that's design as care. When a global professional association can reach a member in Beijing with content that's as clear and accessible to her as it is to someone in New Jersey — that's design as care.
I've spent my career building toward that, in organizations ranging from scrappy innovation labs to major online universities to global professional associations. The scale changes. The mission doesn't.
Outside of work, I create.
I'm drawn to the light and color of the American Southwest — the way it shifts through the day, the way desert landscapes hold silence differently than anything on the east coast where I grew up. I work in oils, printmaking, and drawing, and occasionally digital. I quilt and embroider and crochet. You can see some of that work here→
I think making art and making products require the same fundamental discipline: the willingness to sit with something that isn't working yet, to resist the urge to declare it done too soon, and to keep asking what it's really trying to say. Both have made me better at the other.
I'm currently based in Auburn, NH, and open to leadership roles in UX design, learning experience design, and ed tech product — particularly where those things overlap.
If you're building something that's meant to help people learn, grow, or navigate complexity — I'd love to hear about it.
Let's talk.