I’ve always considered myself someone with a good sense of direction.
Back in the MapQuest Days, I’d memorize the routes to all my friends' houses so I wouldn’t have to print them out. When I started solo traveling, my first day ritual in a new city would always include a walking tour. To see the sights, yes, but also to get a feel for the city. After that, I could usually find my way around without too much trouble.
A good sense of direction.
My internal compass has always gone beyond streets and subways. It's part of what led me to American Sign Language, the Deaf community, and theatre. I’ve been drawn to stages and stories that not only include different kinds of people but center them.
I realized recently that maps—like stories, like theatre, like travel, are about direction. Not just where things are, but who they're for. Who gets to feel seen, included and centered.
When I joined dymaptic, I wasn’t coming in as a GIS expert. I came in with a project manager’s toolbox, a UX designer’s curiosity, and a theatre kid’s obsession with the human experience.
My own story began in ASL interpreting, then moved into ASL theatre—where I directed shows and advocated for accessible storytelling. Now, as a technical project manager in the GIS field, I find myself noticing more and more of the overlap between these worlds.
Sure, my first weeks were full of googling my way through the GIS alphabet soup—AGOL, SHP, WMS, GDB—but it didn’t take long for me to realize how layered the work really was (if you’ll pardon the map pun).
Behind the acronyms, depicted by their unique symbology were the people and communities actually living in the basemaps. As I worked with our developers, I learned the lingo, built fluency in the language of mapping, and understood the goals of our clients more. I realized that even our most technical workflows were just different ways of helping people make better decisions, to learn something that could have a real impact on their communities.
One of the first projects that resonated deeply with me was our work with the International Confederation of Midwives. Coming from a non-GIS background, this project really illustrated how mapping could support and influence real-world outcomes.
We built an ArcGIS Hub site that serves as a central platform for ICM’s global data collection efforts. The goal was to create something that midwifery associations around the world could access, contribute to, learn from, and leverage to influence policy decisions. Our team also designed a streamlined workflow that allowed ICM and their associates to collect structured geospatial data about their workforce and service delivery—feeding into a cohesive living map that helped to surface coverage gaps that may have gone unacknowledged.
Each point on the map was more than just data; they were people. Midwives doing their best in under-resourced areas, communities fighting for better outcomes, policy makers looking for evidence to support their missions. Seeing those maps come to life, knowing they would influence health policy all over the globe made something click for me.
I finally felt the true emotional weight and potential of GIS. I felt an overwhelming sense of pride and responsibility about supporting a project that empowered unsung heroes with much needed information by pairing data-driven insights with human impact.
Equity and accessibility weren't new to me but mapping them was. Suddenly I began to see them spatially. Maps don't just show information—they talk. It was so much like American Sign Language, a visual language created for connection. Accessible. Human.
The vocabulary may have changed, but the purpose hasn’t. It's still about making things that make sense for people who are too often left out of the narrative.
Once I noticed the connection between language, space, and visibility, I began to see it everywhere. Whether it was mapping health inequities or designing tools to support local governments connecting with their communities, each project begged the question “How can we make the invisible, visible?”
A well-made map can show someone what a thousand-word report might struggle to explain.
But it also became clear how easy it is for maps to be exclusive. Overly complicated legend keys, inaccessible web designs, visual clutter, or lack of screen reader compatibility. These are more than UX flaws. They’re barriers. They say, “This story isn’t for you.”
That’s why I think about accessibility constantly when we’re building mapping applications. Maps can be incredibly powerful tools for equity, but only if we design them that way, on purpose. Otherwise, we’re just replicating the same patterns of exclusion we claim to be mapping against. But when we center accessibility from the start, we don’t just make better tools, we make more human ones.
Some stories are told with dialogue. Some with signs. Some, with symbols layered on a screen. And maps built with intention, equity, and care... talk.
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