The Discovery app came out of a specific ethical problem: how do you build a digital system for Indigenous song, language, and cultural practice without flattening it into a Western archive? Working through the Research Unit for Indigenous Arts and Cultures, I collaborated closely with Dr. Sally Treloyn and Dr. Reuben Brown, whose ethnomusicological research and fieldwork shaped the platform's structure. The work was also guided by a harder question raised in "How Do You Feel About Squeezing Oranges?": when knowledge is documented, does the community keep the juice, or are they handed back the empty glass? The result was a relational song database representing more than 60,000 years of cultural practice, built to work with institutional archives without surrendering community control to them. What stays with me most is still simple: handing an iPad to an elder and watching them move through ancestral songs in a system built to return knowledge, not extract it.

I started in visual effects and post-production, where too much important work was being held together with spreadsheets and workarounds, so I built a FileMaker production-tracking database for the Post Effects team because waiting for the industry to solve it was not useful. That instinct carried me across seven years of multidisciplinary work in post, production support, systems design, training, outreach, studio operations, and early digital archiving. I helped co-found the Digital Operations department, developed systems informed by institutions like the Library of Congress and LACMA when entertainment had no settled playbook, mentored interns, launched Friday Nicktern Screenings, and helped bring animation education into underserved schools through Let's Draw. The throughline was not any one tool. It was building structures, access points, and support systems that let creative communities do better work.