My name is Shilpi Gupta. I have been in Colorado for about 12 years. Lexington, Kentucky I consider my hometown. So I moved to Boulder, Colorado for a job at NOAA as a software engineer, and I get to work on this thing called Science on a Sphere. It's this big six foot diameter sphere. We've got four projectors projecting earth data onto it. So when you walk into a room–we have this thing installed in almost 200 museums and science centers worldwide–so you walk into a room, and it looks like you have this big floating Earth in front of you. We have over 500 visualizations from climate change to atmospheric storms–various satellite models. Of those 5-600 data sets, about 40 of them are real-time data. So it’s a unique job, just having this augmented reality application; I'm a visual person, and being able to tie that into software engineering makes it just so fun. To be able to create cool features that we knew were going to be used–that I think is my favorite part. But I feel like it's more from artists that I feel the understanding of how small we are–more than from my work. 

Moments of transition: that's what I really love in life, and expressing that through art. I really love flowers in the desert, the ones that pop out of nowhere, or even on these mountain hikes that I go on sometimes. The landscape creates these natural plant and flower arrangements. One of my friends made this comment to me a few months ago; I posted something on Instagram of dancing in a desert landscape. And then I was also sharing how photography taught me to see. He immediately brought that up–he's like, “Oh, you just posted the place where you were dancing; you were able to see that dead branch and gravitate towards that.” 

I just feel very privileged. I've had a lot of resources. And I'm thankful for that. And I think as I grow older, it's made me aware of how a lot of people don't have those resources. I've been thinking about Gaza and Palestine a lot from a humanitarian place and feeling heartbreak over everyone not having access to things that can help enhance our lives and help us grow and express. When we see more things in the landscape or the person you're photographing, it expands to how you see life more and I think feel people more and people's struggles.