A Brief History of Me

I know this isn’t really what Medium is for, but I’m going to tell you about myself—expanding on the 160 characters in my user blurb. Think of it as a quasi-professional, semi-personal resume. You won’t find any front page-worthy “big ideas” or “important stories” here, and this doesn’t prove my expertise in anything, but it might inform why I engage with the ideas and stories that I do.

1990, A Child is Born

After marrying my dad, my mom immigrated to the States from the Philippines (with me in her belly). I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother and I have our dad’s complexion, so we both grew up with the twofold awareness that we were “different” from our majority white peers, but also that our white-passing made it difficult to connect with our peers at Fil-Am Christmas parties and picnics.

Left to right: My dad, me, my mom, and my brother, Chris.

1995 - 2008 , “Asian-American Overachiever”

From the beginning of elementary school, until I graduated from high school, I was (with external motivation from my mom) hell-bent on being the most “gifted” kid in the room. It all started when my elementary school wanted me to skip from 1st grade to 6th grade after I took some reading test…I ended up skipping to 2nd grade, and they put me in a gifted program. By middle school, I had it in my head that I had to do all of the “smart” things: read the smart books (which I interpreted as reading the old white man “classics”); be precociously good at art (I have Bob Ross to thank for that); write like I knew what I was talking about (when I actually just knew a lot of words); get good test scores (when I was actually trash at standardized testing); and get into a good college.

Me working from home on a toy laptop.

2008 - 2012 , Wandering in the Woods, Part I

I ended up getting into a top college. At Washington University in St. Louis, I started on a track to major in Painting but also take Pre-Med classes (hahahaha), but ended up double majoring in Painting and Art History (to my parents’ dismay). I had the privilege to study abroad in Florence, Italy, where I ate a lot of salami, basically lived in museums, and grew to care for my cohort like family. I graduated with a pretty decent art portfolio and an art history thesis that I wish I could redo. (Instead of parroting my advisor’s expertise on the Italian Renaissance, I would have done original research on Filipinx artists that I couldn’t find anywhere in the the Art & Art History Library…)

On a field trip to Rome while studying abroad in Florence, probably looking very intently at a building. (Photo credit: Kate Cohen)

2012 - 2015 , Wandering in the Woods, Part II

After graduating, I worked as an unpaid artist assistant, a gallery assistant, and somehow landed a design strategy internship at Kiku Obata & Co…But then, those things came to a close. I ended up working a retail job and a coffee shop job, and decided it was time to go back to school—this time for design.

2015 - present, Here We Go! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I moved to LA to attend the Media Design Practices program at ArtCenter College of Design (and my partner moved down with me because he was conveniently in SF). After spending three years learning how to be a designer in a very “anti-industry” way, I completed a post-graduate fellowship where I did couple of things:

Reconstructing Practice conference participants gathering for the opening plenary. (Photo credit: Joel Aaron)

Co-organized and designed the spatial experience for the Antiracist Classroom’s first conference: Reconstructing Practice.

This conference brought together and created opportunities for connection, knowledge sharing, and fellowship amongst a wide-ranging group of creators & educators of color.

Front cover image of The Blue Dot: A User’s Guide.

Extended my thesis project The Blue Dot: A User’s Guide into a book which I wrote, illustrated, and designed.

The hand-bound print run of the book had to stay very small (for now) so if you want to read it, you can find it here!

Now that you have a better sense of where I’m coming from…

This Medium will be a place for me to talk through all things design, maps, location, globalization, visual culture, communication technologies, social equity, and everything in between.

Godiva Veliganilao Reisenbichler

Written by

https://portfolio.godiva.reisen/ Interaction + UX Designer. Alum of Media Design Practices @ Art Center & WashU. Currently working at IBM in San Jose. she/her.

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