About

Fashion designer, metal singer, filmmaker, brand builder, technologist. It makes sense, I promise.

I'm Chief Creative & Technology Officer at Girl Effect, where I lead teams in Nairobi, Kigali, Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, Abuja, Johannesburg and Mumbai. Together we build chatbots, apps and media with young people across Africa and South Asia.

I grew up on the Texas-Mexico border in Canutillo, a rural town outside El Paso, Texas, in largely immigrant communities. I'm a first-generation Mexican American and Indigenous Pueblo woman. I made my own clothes, wrote my own music and sang in a metal band at 18, then studied fashion and sustainable design, which led to four years living in a garment factory in India.

In 2013 the Nike Foundation moved me to Rwanda. Since then I've worked alongside experts in brand, advertising, human-centred design, technology, safeguarding, and film, and picked up a bit of each. It's been continuous start-up mode ever since: new markets almost every year, products taken from zero to one and on to millions of young people, and building with AI back when it was mostly keyword matching and a lot of hope.