Hello! My name’s Adelyn, but my friends and family call me Ad. I’m a 22-year-old artist currently based in Boston, MA. While I have many passions, my heart is in anything that allows me to add my creative spin. Throughout high school, college, and beyond, I’ve explored various avenues of creative expression, including multimodal translation, video essays, sewing, fashion design, painting, crocheting, and knitting. While this portfolio is mainly to showcase my favorite parts of my creative journey, I also include aspects of my professional and educational background to provide a more well-rounded perspective on my creative choices.

From a young age, I was wildly passionate about creating. Both my mom and my grandmother encouraged my peculiar, ever growing imagination. At the age of 6, I began drawing and painting. At the age of 8, I taught myself how to sew, inspired by my grandmother, who always made me ornate dresses and bags from the most beautiful fabrics. She’d let me pick out patterns and fabrics, spend hours sewing with me, and ultimately take over the project when my little mind got tired and frustrated. Throughout middle school and high school, I continued to craft, mostly focused on painting. In my senior year of high school, I built my fine art portfolio. At the age of 16, I taught myself how to crochet. It became my obsession, and I delved into a frenzy of fiber arts and pattern design.

When it came time to go to college, I dreamed of fashion school in New York City or fine arts at SCAD, but I’ve always been a realist, and I wasn’t sure if art was truly my path. I knew I had a lot to offer, but too little life experience to know how. Do I go to law school? What if I become a psychiatrist? Maybe I’d make a good teacher? It took some time, but eventually I found a passion in something that allowed me to combine my interests. I studied Linguistics and Spanish, as well as Translation and Interpreting, and English Teaching (TESOL) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Throughout my studies, I became incredibly passionate about the field of translation and interpreting. I found the art and creativity in everything I did, finding the study of both inter-lingual and multi-modal translation to be wildly fascinating and creatively challenging.

Upon graduation, I had accepted a job teaching English in Spain and I was set to leave the coming October. In the meantime, I interviewed for different jobs so that I could work throughout the summer. However, all my plans turned upside down when I was accepted to the first job I applied for: Machine Learning Data Associate at Amazon’s AGI. I was suddenly thrown on a different path, at a time when finding a job was an impossibility, especially for someone with a liberal arts background. I was faced with the opportunity of starting a career at a time when so many of my age couldn’t. So I decided to see what Amazon held for me.

But where does this leave me in my creative journey? It leaves me searching, practicing, and waiting patiently for the opportunity to combine all my fields and interests. In the meantime, I use my creative mind to solve problems, interact with colleagues, and innovate in a way only an artist could. Outside of work (or sometimes on my breaks), I paint, crochet, and design clothes, hoping that one day, my part-time hobby will become my full-time profession.