Instructional Designer

A Filmmaker’s Eye, a Teacher’s Heart, a Designer’s Mind

I’m an instructional designer with over 10 years of experience across eLearning, digital media production, and visual design.

I’ve always felt that learning should be engaging, not a passive exercise in sitting through a lecture and hoping something sticks. Boring is not an option.

That belief took root during my undergraduate years studying digital media design and video and film production, under an instructor who expected nothing less than excellence, a standard I’ve held myself to ever since.

During my undergraduate years, I assisted an instructor leading a five-day faculty workshop on After Effects. Several instructors told me I’d been a genuine help, and I realized I loved to teach. Around the same time, I completed a digital media fellowship focused on video production.

I carried that into e-commerce, where I was handed dense scripts for RFID-based technology and asked to turn them into instructional videos: more than 95 of them across nearly six years, with the most-viewed passing 242,000 views on YouTube. I framed each scene so technical content felt visually alive, and coached our talent both on camera and in the voiceover booth. I once asked them to say “today” more clearly; what came back was “tooday.” It became a little inside joke. But that’s how you learn.

What I’d been doing by instinct had a name: instructional design. That sent me to CU Denver for an M.A. in Learning Design and Technology, where graduate school gave structure to years of instinct. Alongside faculty, some of the nicest people I’ve worked with, I helped refine Canvas courses’ visual design and accessibility, so the courses worked for every student.

My capstone was the T-PREP Undergraduate Handbook. T-PREP trains students at rural Colorado colleges to become teachers in their own communities, and the Canvas handbook is where those students go for requirements, deadlines, and everything else. Dr. Valerie Sherman, the program director, and I read all 29 pages together the way a student would, flagging broken links, out-of-date information, and content that was accurate but hard to find. I rebuilt it around what we found: restructuring how students move through it, building an expandable menu and read-more components in Canvas’s HTML editor when the standard tools couldn’t produce them, designing a set of icons to break up long stretches of text, and running every page through the accessibility checker. It’s live in Canvas today.

My father is the most brilliant man I know: witty, funny, humble, one of the best problem solvers I’ve ever seen. Now retired, he spent his career as a research professor who cared deeply about his students. My mother taught blind and partially sighted children before I was born. I come from a family of teachers, and somewhere along the way, that became my story too.

From January to August 2026, I was a Senior Instructional Designer at the Rocky Mountain Public Health Training Center at the Colorado School of Public Health, where I recorded narration, edited instructor presentations into training videos, and captioned courses for the public health workforce across six states and 32 tribal nations. My grant-funded position ended in August due to funding cuts, and I’m now looking for my next instructional design role in higher education.