Turning emerging technology
into experiences you can
stand inside.

A story of Lyra, who came to Earth as a celestial being full of light and joy. She fell in love, and was slowly consumed by it, until her own glow dimmed to almost nothing. A signal reached her through music, and it woke something up: her light returned through the act of creating. She was reborn, and she rose.

This is The Origin of Light, a stage-to-sky show told over Historic Fort York in Toronto. 450 drones became Lyra's body and radiated her energy. A 15-piece live orchestra carried her arc. Eight artists rendered 90 minutes of AI-generated holograms projected into the night. Two vocalists sang the turning points. And 500 people felt the tale of a woman lose her light and find it again.

Based on my story, one that I wrote, scored, and co-produced it. More than that, this event was a proof of concept: a ticketed show, a demonstration of what this team could build, and a piece of IP designed to license. A narrative with soul is what made it work. Audiences don't turn out for spectacle alone, they turn out for something that makes them feel.

The story, in frames. Lyra's story played across a projection surface the width of the Toronto skyline, the orchestra in silhouette before it, the city and iconic CN Tower behind and a dancing swarm of drones above. Pure magic.

The constraint. A production of this scale runs near $100K. We delivered it for roughly half, through sponsorship, content-capture partnerships, and an owned network of AI creators. We navigated rare permitting inside Fort York, a full one-week rain delay, eight artists from across the globe, an orchestra, and a drone fleet, all coordinated to one unforgettable evening.

The reach. 10+ press placements across television, radio, and online, in English, Korean, and Filipino. The format has drawn licensing interest, including conversations with Six Flags and an Australian symphony.

For three years I produced Meta's AR layer at Coachella, the most-watched festival on Earth. Like the selection of artists and art installations, the concept was built to evolve, and it did: from a feeling, to a presence, to something festival-goers could help create.

The connective narrative was mirage energy, the resonant hum that connects people to the desert and to each other. Each year we explored the shift of this energy through the layers of artistic expression across the festival.

YEAR ONE, the feeling returns. The first festival back after the pandemic. We reimagined five iconic Coachella art installations from years past as location-based AR in five cities around the world, each built by a creator native to that place. Fans were introduced to the art pieces in their own homes, revealed through an AR-enabled welcome box. A narrative that carried to the festival weekends, where attendees unlocked an AR portal on-site at Spectra, the central meeting location on the Coachella Festival grounds, welcoming the art installations and festival goers back to the desert.

YEAR TWO, the energy takes form. This year, we centralized the Mirage energy, making it tangible through every experience we built and anchored it into the physical grounds. In collaboration with four large-scale installation artists, we built AR that lived on their sculptures and shifted with the time of day. And with two weeks left before gates, the festival's Discord community used AI to generate and vote on a mascot, Harmony the Hare, which my team prototyped in fourteen days, and brought her alive in AR with proximity awareness, leveraging the tech to showcase its potential as an interactive tool for storytelling.

YEAR THREE, the Canvas. This was the year we leveraged data from years past and tightened the production. After two years of escalating scale, this year focused the program with intention and led with restraint in place of spectacle. With far fewer creators and activations, we supported the Instagram team to understand attendee proximity to effect usage, and curated a smaller set of well-executed filters.

Making it happen: The Triangle.

Managing a build of this scale meant defining a repeatable operating model, an innovative partner fluent enough to move fast, the right creator pairings carefully matched to each experience, and embedded AR product support for real-time troubleshooting. Get all three right and a program this size holds together and moves at the tempo of a world-class festival.

Leaving something real behind. When the AR program was sunset at Meta, my assigned task was to gracefully wind down the creator ecosystem. As a final gift, we found a single engineer who believed in our work, and together we shipped the location-anchored experience template to the creator community, end to end. It was the one capability we prototyped across all years that actually made it into their hands. Being able to close a full loop at a time where resources were thin was undoubtedly a career milestone.

Across three years, the program spanned eight distinct experience formats, from VIP welcome-box reveals to city-scale geo-located AR, artist album collaborations, and brand product launches. The always-on beauty effects alone drove reach in the hundreds of millions of impressions.

It started with a question. Meta's teams came to me to source an AR creator for the launch of Doja Cat's video for her release of the album "Woman." My expertise was focused on sourcing and pairing talent, so the ask made sense. But something felt off, so I asked: why hire an outside creator when you could teach your own girls to build it? The room lit up. They asked who would teach them. I will, of course.

That "of course" was an easy yes, and came from a place deeply meaningful to me. Early in my career, I had a boss who invested heavily in the talent of her team. She stayed late to teach me to code, line by line, and that single skill changed the entire trajectory of my life. Understanding the logic of code eventually gave me the confidence to leave unfavourable circumstances, as I believed strongly that it was skill that was consistently in demand. So when they asked who would teach these girls, I didn't hesitate as this was my opportunity to pay forward the generosity of my early mentor.

From a moment to a system. After the pilot, RCA wanted to do it again. I suggested we make it a program. Now that we had the mechanics, I built a playbook, one cohort at a time. Additionally, I scaled myself out of the only teaching chair by sourcing strong women AR creators from across the ecosystem to mentor each cohort, turning a personal act into a repeatable system. What's more: every cohort's curriculum was recorded as an asset for Girls Who Code's wider network, at the time, more than 500,000 girls. A handful at a time, designed to reach half a million.

Five cohorts followed, each refined more than the last, pairing young women with RCA artists including Doja Cat, P!nk, Latto, and Becky G, and with the Chadwick Boseman Foundation in support of Howard University's fine arts students. Planning the final cohort, I paired Becky G with a mentor whose agency was in Mexico. Only later did we learn the artist and the mentor came from the same small town, two women who had willed themselves onto a global stage, now doing it together.

This was the most meaningful work of my career. It took the skill that gave me the key to my freedom, and turned it into a system that could hand that same confidenc to the women tech usually overlooks, intimately, and at the scale of a 500,000-strong network. The manifesto here: find freedom through skills, and pay it forward on purpose. An opportunity I am deeply grateful I was able to participate in.

Drone productions for global brands and civic moments.

My work in the community was continuous. I supported with answers, connecting people who would benefit from knowing each other, asking the questions that surfaced the blockers, and carrying what I heard back to internal product teams.

Underneath the 100K sat a curated group of ~300 trusted builders from around the world, where I was one of twelve admins. Here lived the deeper conversations, higher trust, and the group Meta always wanted to tap for research.

Through covid I organised that group to meet biweekly in Quest headsets. We built while we talked, organically, exploring in ways only seen with like-minded people on an adventure together.

In January 2025, when Meta sunset the creator AR platform, I scripted and produced the 'goodbye' video for the community. It was my own initiative, approved by comms.

I'm still in touch with people from that community who are building with AI now. The product may have ended, the community did not.

At Samsung's New York flagship we ran it for a month. Eight creators paired across four weekends, a Friday evening talk followed by two days of hands-on AR workshops. Attendance stayed near capacity and grew roughly 20% weekend over weekend.

At Meta's developer summits in London, New York and San Francisco, 75 to 100 creators and agency partners at a time, the same shape. Capability sessions, then a two-day build, then UX workshops with a hand-picked few.

The talk gets people in the door. The building is what they remember.