Thaís Xisto

I'm an incoming student-researcher at the MIT Media Lab, working with the Lifelong Kindergarden Group. I was born in Recife, Brazil but I've lived significant parts of my life in Miami, Amherst, and San Francisco. Before coming to the Media Lab, I was working as a freelance web developer making quirky and interactive sites for mission-driven companies like Somewhere Good . From 2018 through 2019 I worked as a software engineer at Hustle, building a texting platform that enabled grassroots organizations to scale personal conversations. Around that time I also volunteered at Dynamicland, a research group that's aiming to create a "new humane dynamic medium" (ask me in person what that means). From 2016 through 2018 (plus a summer in 2015), I worked at Facebook and hated it so... moving on.

I majored in Computer Science and also studied Japanese and Environmental History at Amherst College. My main hobbies right now are powerlifting, cooking, and watching anime. But I'm insatiably curious (and have ADHD) so every few months I pick up something new. Past hobbies: ukulele playing, scuba diving, climbing, dancing, gymnastics, digital art-making, and at least a dozen more. I'm a queer, non-binary person, please use "they/them" pronouns for me.

My research interests involve casual creativity, culturally-sustaining pedagogies, self-determination theory, theories of learner agency, embodied learning, and what new human-computer interactions can be created to support creative learning.