Maria is happiest when she can find new insights, reveal hidden connections and bring clarity to complexity.

Maria's background spans the disciplines of user experience strategy and design; content strategy; software and hardware design; and development, product management, technical communications and public relations.

Maria is active in the design community and is a member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) and the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI (BayCHI). She's a Local Leader for IxDA San Francisco and previously founded IxDA Atlanta. At the IxDA's Interaction 10 conference, she gave a talk titled, “Interaction Design for the 4th Dimension” in which she explored temporal considerations for design.

For fun, Maria is a competitive driver, an avid photographer and an interactive digital media artist. She's especially interested in the intersection of interactive art and computational physics, and its power to transform public spaces. Maria works with similarly-inspired artists, photographers and coders and has collaborated with members of Montreal's Topological Media Lab on a variety of installations. She is also a licensed amateur radio operator with call sign W6IXD.

Though meticulous and exacting, Maria is generally easygoing and doesn't take things too seriously, except when it comes to espresso and dominoes.