What I'm Up To Lately

A dispatch from the other side of grad school.

knit.city on display at the Clive Davis Gallery in March, 2026

Not too long ago, I quit my job as an editor after twelve years in journalism and enrolled at NYU ITP to learn to make new kinds of things. I graduated in May, after two years of nonstop tinkering, coding, and learning. Time moved strangely while I was there; I felt a sort of pre-nostalgia for the experience from the moment I stepped onto campus.

I got to feel truly curious again, and to follow those curiosities down unexpected paths. I got to feel a genuine sense of possibility, which had all but foreclosed itself to me. What would I do with these newly honed skills — game design, programming, electronics — and how would they live alongside my tried-and-true set — writing, editing, handmaking?

I’m still figuring out the answer to that question. I do have a much better idea now, but the scary thing, after a lifetime built on legibility, is that it’s not cohering into a single job. Rather, it’s a handful of pursuits across a collection of industries — writing, teaching, making games and objects and inventions — particularly at the places where those vocations run up against each other.

Here is what I’ve been up to since graduation:

• Attended the Open Hardware Summit in Berlin, where I exhibited a sampling of electronic textiles — my threadboards, some experiments in soft lamps along with my favorite collaborator Yafira, and a series of knitted clocks.

• Spoke at the AIGA New York Fresh Grad Design Spotlight, alongside a handful of other Masters graduates from design programs around the city.

• Moderated a panel about data as artistic medium for NY Tech Week.

• Began working on a story about video games for Bloomberg Businessweek (print!)

• Taught at my beloved ITP Camp as a counselor once again.

• Went to the Narrascope conference at SUNY Albany to show an even-more-miniature version of my miniature escape room game, The Keeping House, and attended talks by fellow narrative game designers and folks working with interactive methods of storytelling.

• Showed my thesis game, Loose Ends, at Brooklyn Comic Con in its handknitted arcade console. More to come on that project soon.

• Piloted an intro-to-knitting-meets-coding-history class for some absolutely delightful middle schoolers at the Lower Eastside Girls Club; it always strikes me how much more willing children are to be bad at a new skill or activity than adults are.

• Went to the launch for a new fiber arts magazine called close knit nyc, in which I have a featured piece, and finished work on an article for Needlebound Volume III, a textile and technology periodical I’ve long admired.

• Installed my first solo work at Acorn Craft in Brooklyn — an electronic wall hanging called knit.city, and more of the handknitted clocks, which I’ve begun to sell and will be teaching a workshop about making in the fall. I’ll also be giving my first ever artist talk there in August. Stay tuned if that sounds up your alley!

Taken together, it’s a true hodgepodge of activities, some yielding payment and others…decidedly not. Returning to school was a reprieve from (some of) the pressures of real life, and navigating reentry while trying to hold onto the feelings and the lessons and the version of myself I got to be there has been challenging.

Starting in the fall, I’ll be working part-time at ITP as a research resident for the upcoming academic year. My focus is design, a banner under which a lot of my work falls. I plan to use that time to teach, write, and work on my games and textile pieces — a pilot year, in a sense, for the balance I’d like to strike long-term.

I’m in the market for new projects, opportunities and people that might fit into this bizarre tapestry of a career I’m cultivating — and I could use some help from you. If you have thoughts on anyone I should talk to, Substacks I should subscribe to, conferences or residencies or awards I should look into, or collaborations you’d like to explore together in NYC, SF, LA, and beyond, please do drop me a line at alanna.okun@nyu.edu. I so appreciate every connection, note, and signal that what I’m trying to do here isn’t utterly deranged.