Mackenzie is an honors student in the School of Fine Arts graduating with a bachelor’s degree in digital media and design and a minor in computer science. Some of her academic achievements include being featured on the Dean’s List throughout her undergraduate career and achieving the title of New England Scholar. Her thesis project, “Through a Glass,” is a 2D interactive storytelling game that introduces depersonalization-derealization disorder to players, and it is showcased in Unraveled, the 2021 UConn Digital Media & Design BFA Senior Exhibition.

On campus, Mackenzie is an Undergraduate Research Assistant to UConn’s Green House Studios—a factory of diverse collaborations across students, faculty, and staff whose mission is to build humanities scholarship with engaging designs. In their nomination letter for this award, the Department of Digital Media and Design wrote, “Mackenzie is truly a ‘unicorn’—that mythical practitioner that brings strengths to all areas of digital practice.”

Reflecting this, she has contributed her artistic visualization to diverse projects including Léamh, Husky ReView, Ellen Emmet Rand, and Hartford Bound. These projects have been ambitious and socially important, as they respectively focus on language learning; activism on the UConn campus; women in art and business; and immigration of Black and Brown groups to CT.

Her talent has not only captivated the UConn community, but also a larger audience, as the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center awarded her with a prize commission in the Spring of 2020. Centering her work on incarceration, she became the sole author of a virtual reality experience of solitary confinement. After UConn, she aims to earn a leadership position at a game development company and continue working with other creatives.