Shanna Christie

My Story So Far . . .

There is not a time in my life when I don’t remember observing everything around me and wanting to share it with others.  First there were the stories typed up and given out in little illustrated booklets in Elementary school.  Notes to friends in middle school, drawn out in elaborate comic book format.  Editorships of my highschool newspaper and college yearbook.  Currently, I share things through developing digital content, using social networking, online video, print design, and information visualization.  (I’m incredibly curious as what it will be 5-10 years from now.)

Although I never really knew what to call this interest of mine, it has been the absolute constant in my life.  Regardless of where I was, or my other interests at the time, I’ve always found myself returning to a need to almost “package” life somehow.   I’ve always taken a very multi-media approach to this – spanning interests in writing, drawing, photography, and video – which have all eventually merged into print and website design and content.  The visuals were as important as the writing, and the end result was what mattered, and I’ve always learned what I’ve needed technically to achieve it.

I realize now that what I’ve been doing all my life is storytelling.  The stories of the places, the people and the subjects around me.  This fall I will be starting my first quarter in the University of Washington’s Master of Communication in Digital Media program which has an emphasis on storytelling.  I’m very excited to see how this will help me take what has been a consistent but somewhat unfocused approach to things, and put it all together.  I hope!