New Year's Day, Joshua Tree National Park, California. 2014.

Hi, I'm Mariana.

My family moved from Argentina to California in 1980 to seek refuge from political unrest and to follow their entrepreneurial spirits.

I grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley at a time when everything was happening very quickly and very vividly; tech booms, housing booms, IPOs, biomedical breakthroughs, earthquakes, droughts...you name it, it was happening.

Although I was fascinated by the innovations all around me, I gravitated toward classical fine arts and stories of the past. For most of my childhood and early adulthood, I was a classical ballet dancer and performed with various schools and companies in the bay area. I studied piano, enjoyed creative writing, and published essays and poems in a few small-scale literary journals. Fascinated by the intersection of art, science, and maths I discovered here in the Valley, I developed a love for Linguistics and Semantics, and uncovered a lovely fusion of classical symbolic logic and modern-day language programming. That was how I landed my first tech gig as a linguistic analyst at Microsoft for one of the voice recognition platforms.

I moved away and then moved back, because that’s what the Bay Area does to natives; it beckons them back and gives them more. At some point, I fell in love with a very handsome man and I moved to La Honda for 3 years to live with him in an enchanted redwood forest, one hour south of San Francisco. Now, we live in a little east bay enclave; El Cerrito. We have lemons trees, succulents, agaves, a silly black cat, a goofy white dog…oh and a bombastic toddler!

I like to tinker in the kitchen and whip up jams, pickles, cakes, stews, and the occasional pavlova. I do even more tinkering when I'm experimenting with textiles or up-cycling and refinishing furniture that I find in the most random of places- be it rummage sales or friends' basements, or even the side of the highway.

I love the things I do in real space, but I also love what I do in virtual space. As a product strategist with a Linguistics & Semantics background, I lead the effort in making compelling data-driven tech products that make sense to people, solve their problems, and hopefully offer some delight in their day.