Professional Highlights
As Production Lead at Night Kitchen Interactive, I guide the creation of interpretive animations, serious games, and immersive media that bring art, science, and history to life. These featured projects were created collaboratively, with me shaping the creative and technical direction alongside my team of artists and developers.
Blacktip Reef: Ecosystem Balance Game
The National Aquarium
I produced an animated coral reef balancing game for the National Aquarium’s Blacktip Reef gallery. The experience invites visitors to build and maintain a healthy digital reef by introducing different species and observing how environmental conditions change in response.
I was responsible for concept design, creative production, and technical direction. I collaborated with subject matter experts on a paper prototype to gather early audience feedback, helped shape the visual language and animation approach, and designed interactive systems that bring the reef to life across large-format touchscreen installations.
Whale Watch: AR Animated Exhibit
The New Bedford Whaling Museum
I led the creation of an augmented reality experience that brings Reyna, a 49-foot North Atlantic Right Whale, to life inside the gallery. Using tethered iPads, visitors encounter accurate animations layered directly onto the suspended skeleton, reconstructed from NOAA reference data.
The experience balances scientific rigor with emotional storytelling, transforming the static display into an eye-to-eye encounter with a critically endangered species and connecting to deeper learning about conservation and ocean stewardship throughout the exhibit.
Natural Cycles: Animated interactives
The Bruce Museum
For the Bruce Museum’s reinstallation of its permanent Science Galleries, I led the development of a suite of animated interactive experiences exploring the forces that shape our natural world. Working with exhibition designers and scientists, our team produced seven interactives that illustrate abstract scientific concepts like tides, orbital patterns, and fossilization.
The project combined real-time visualization, cinematic animation, and spatial storytelling across multiple gallery zones. Highlights included a holographic fossilization interactive that reveals a real specimen behind layered digital animation on a semi-transparent touchscreen, and a synchronized light-and-sound installation that transforms a woodland diorama from day to night.
Sail the Seas: Fulldome Videography
The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
I helped produce an immersive fulldome experience that uses 360° videography and motion graphics to place visitors aboard the historic Maryland Dove. We captured cinematic VR footage from rare vantage points using an Insta360 camera, pairing it with narrated storytelling and spatially composed motion graphics.
To bring the work into the gallery, I supported the installation of a portable 15-foot fulldome theater, transforming the museum’s visitor center into a shared, immersive environment.
Experiments
My personal digital projects range from 3D models and character sculpts to real-time experiments and photogrammetry captures. I like to play around with new techniques in my spare time so they’re thoroughly vetted before I introduce them to my classroom or client work.
Sketchbook
My personal art style is bold, loose, and expressive. I like to illustrate dreamscapes and memories with a quick, gestural style, and fill sketchbooks like it’s my job.
Visually Val 