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Summer Workshops 2026-Storytelling & Tinkering (workshop sign up here) Are you interested in playful ʻāina-centered STEAM workshops designed for all ages? Let's create, learn, and innovate together in explorations infused with culture, sustainability, and place-based design.
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Mizu-Wai/Story Weaving East Maui Waterways is a community art initiative rooted in the ancestral relationship between water, wai, and people of East Maui. Grounded in Native Hawaiian epistemologies of ʻāina and pilina, this project integrates visual art, ecological mapping, and participatory workshops to illuminate water’s cultural, environmental, and spiritual currents as living carriers of moʻolelo (stories) and memory. Funded with an East Maui Water Authority Grant and a Hoʻākea Source Grant Award. 2026
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Seed Lei Bracelet workshops in collaboration with the Pu'uhonua Society and the Honolulu Botanical Gardens (sign up)
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Introducing Synthetic Biology Using Co-Designed, Culturally Responsive BioMaker Activities for Family Engagement in Underserved Communities, NSF Grant. PI: Dr. Justice Toshiba Walker. NSF grant to study synthetic biology learning in the context of families and informal learning environments. This investment will help us examine what it looks like to interact and learn with modern biotechnology. I am a practitioner consultant on this three year grant. 2025-2027
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NSF CAREER grant: Strengthening the infrastructuring practices of informal STEM educators for the equitable implementation and sustainability of innovations in learning with computing. I am a practitioner consultant on this five year grant that was awarded to PI Ricarose Roque of UC Boulder Colorado where she is Director of the Creative Communities research group.
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RECENTLY COMPLETED PROJECTS:
- Ulana Sparks, a series of workshops generously subsidized with funding from the Bits and Threads: Weaving cultural worlds and computing in community-based settings with support from the Office for Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship at the University of Colorado Boulder. Honolulu, Hawai'i, 2026
- Introducing Synthetic Biology Using Co-Designed, Culturally Responsive BioMaker Activities for Family Engagement in Underserved Communities, I am a consultant on this NSF Grant under PI: Dr. Justice Toshiba Walker. $1.7M NSF grant to study synthetic biology learning in the context of families and informal learning environments. This investment will help us examine what it looks like to interact and learn with modern biotechnology. Funding from NSF REVISE: Reimaging Equity and Values in Informal STEM Education.
- Schools of the Future Conference, Play & Pilina display in Garden Playground hall. Honolulu Convention Center, 2025
- Hala Exhibition- Wailoa Center, Hilo, Hawaii, 2025, Play & Pilina interactive installation is a part of this group exhibition. My interactive installation invites visitors to play with lauhala bots—modifying them by inserting plant materials into sugarcane straws. Behind the station, a shelf displays lauhala circuitry bots and woven breadboards in conversation with my father’s childhood toys, handmade from natural materials during his days growing up in Kahului and the Pāʻia Maui sugar plantation labor camp. [Instagram reel of event]
- Biodesign collaborative course design for Wild Ways of Making for Spring 2025. Collaboration with Meenu Singh, MS.Ed, Lead Experience Designer, Stanford d.school, Stanford University. 2025
- A Microbial Art Palette Rooted In Place to Support Community Science, 2025
- Consulting with the Biodesign Challenge on developing educational biodesign resources for educators and teens. Supported by a Siegal Family Foundation Endowment Grant. 2024-2025
- BIO4E, Advisory Board member and co-designer of community story collecting and survey tool. 2024
- Floating Future Gardens installation at Emergence, a Fathomers exhibition at the Japanese America Community & Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA, 2024
- Hartnell College Foundation K-12 STEAM Programs for Summer, 2024 and 2025. Developing workshops for over three thousand student is K-6th grade across two Salinas school districts.
- Place-based natural materials design workshop series, for USE, RE-USE and RADICAL RE-USE course for Sustainability and Art majors, Professor Mary Babcock, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Oahu, Hawai’i. April, 2024.Maui Silt-Sock Mycoremediation Experiment Program (culminating lab note), Maui, Hawai'i, 2024
- Ancient Futures Workshop, a futurist STEAM immersive learning experience at Stanford O’Donohue Educational Farm, Stanford University, 2024
- ‘ĀinaQuest, Co-founder 2024
- Pono STEAM Kits/ A sustainable Hawai’i bio-makerspace rooted in cultural & ancestral knowledge 2023
- Presentation of abstract for Cultivating Biodesigners: Integrating Local Biology, Culture, and Place-Based Design in Education, Research Directions: Biotechnology Design, Cambridge University Press, at the Biodesign Challenge Symposium 2024. This abstract is a response to a research question in Biotechnology Design: "How do we grow a Biodesigner?"
[Expanded paper abstract] - Sustainable Unmaking Keynote, CHI Conference, Honolulu, HI, 2024
- Artist Residency, 2022-23 SCU/Montalvo Artist Lucas Fellow February 11-April 30, 2023Exhibition at Santa Clara University
- Floating Kīpuka Grow Kit, Ginkgo Bioworks Creative Residency, 2022
