Drawing of Isabel wielding a huge Kuretake ink pen
Isabel
Li
is...
(drawing ↗ 🖍️
/ writing 💌
/ researching 🔍
/ programming ↗ 👾
/ designing ↗ ✂️
/ etc. 💭)...

Last updated June 2025.
Kia ora!

I’m Isabel Li, a Chinese-Kiwi illustrator, writer, and human-computer interaction researcher. I studied Computer Science, Creative Writing, Design, and New Media at UC Berkeley. Currently, I research how digital tools can support creativity and art-making in collaboration with the Berkeley Institute of Design.

I often cross the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco, California, and Auckland, New Zealand. You can find me wide-eyed at the gachapon in Japantown, documenting each dog at Alamo Square with a Kuretake, or hovering behind the fiction at Unity Books.

You can find some of my illustrations and writing published in The New River, Taper, Kernel, Re-Draft, The Seventh Wave, Club Rambutan, and forthcoming in Sine Theta.

Some things that make my heart beat faster include queer interpretations of pre-19th century literature, cartoons with awful bad-boy characters, peculiar ice cream flavours, clothing with ribbons and pearled buttons, sitting by the sea, and coming across cognates organically.

下次见!