Anna Christine

Senior Strategy Specialist, UX

Anna started at AREA 17 as a UX Apprentice, and now as a Senior Strategy Specialist, UX, she specializes in designing accessible, inclusive experiences. She's witnessed how many users, or "exclusion experts," to borrow a term from Kat Holmes, blame themselves for flaws in a product's design, so she aims to design experiences that meet the user where they are. She is driven by the collaborative process of making things and developing ideas together. Her key client engagements include Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CannonDesign, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

In a previous career, she worked as a cartoonist and educator, earning a PhD in English Literature from Tufts University. As a PhD candidate, she won multiple fellowships for her scholarly work and teaching, including a Gittleman Fellowship to develop a hybrid theory/practice-based comics course through the Experimental College. Her comics work has garnered awards; most notably, she won a grant from the Boston Metropolitan Area Planning Council to create a comic on inclusive growth and mobility, which educates and engages community stakeholders through visual storytelling. These values inform her UX practice, which was jump started by an immersive program at General Assembly.

On the weekends, she loves exploring public arts initiatives and museums with her partner and her dog. Other favorite weekend activities include sampling local cheeses and baked goods and discovering new comics at her local comic book store.