Vanessa owns NIFPlay's entire digital presence, from UX and product strategy to the technical systems underneath. She built the current nifplay.org from the ground up and continues to run it.

Her background is in human-computer interaction and educational technology (Master's, Carnegie Mellon), which means she thinks about design the way you'd think about learning: what does a person need to understand, and when, and what gets in the way?

When she's not rebuilding something that didn't ask to be rebuilt, she's probably underwater or halfway up a mountain — ideally somewhere she's never been before.