Close to the work, far from politics.

The name is a promise about how I work. I take two clients at a time, maximum. I embed deep, I stay through the storm of shipping, and I hand off a product in the world, a system your team can build on, and no dependency on me.

The work lives at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. I've shipped a camera app to a million dollars in revenue, designed a camera's entire experience onto a 72-pixel-wide screen, and spent the last few years building products with AI teams from research labs to film studios. If your product is zero and needs to be one, that's the job I want.

I started as a copywriter at a tiny but massively creative Japanese design studio, moved into design, and ended up running a bilingual design practice as a creative director at a chaotic Tokyo agency. Back stateside I ran both product and design at two camera companies, did time on big teams at Google, Adobe, Amazon, and Microsoft, and went in-house at GoPro to design a new camera's entire experience from zero. Hold Fast Studio has been running since 2019.

Seattle, then Tokyo, then Hokkaido, now Bend, Oregon. I grew up on skateboarding, snowboarding, and punk rock, and never outgrew any of it. Girl dad. There is usually a camera within reach.