Anamary Leal

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Anamary Leal is an Assistant Professor at Sonoma State University in California.

In THIRD Lab, she was a Human-Computer Interaction doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech’s Computer Science program in the Center of Human-Computer Interaction.

She is passionate about crafting, and empowering others to craft and build what they want.

With her advisor, Steve Harrison, her long term research goal is to investigate how to design technologies to help people build in the real world, whether it is sewing clothing, dabbling with electronics and beyond. She wants to encourage people dive into building, like the kinds of things built in maker spaces.

Specifically for her Ph.D thesis, she investigates how to design interactions and representations of fabric to help costume and fashion designers pick fabric in situations where they are unable to feel the fabric directly, such as shopping online. Designers use a network of words to describe the fabric, some of which are context-specific, ambiguous or contradictory. Her thesis is about how to use such information to represent fabric in various ways.

She also has experiences as a costume shop assistant, costumer for community theater, and an award-winning costumer on individual designs. Additionally she is involved in diversity initiatives as an active member of the Association for Women in Computing and Latinas in Computing.

For more information, check out her page: anamary.net

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