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

Last updated May 2026.
Kia ora!

I’m Isabel Li, a Chinese-Kiwi illustrator, writer, and human-computer interaction researcher. Currently, I research how digital tools can support creativity and art-making in collaboration with the Berkeley Institute of Design and Design Tools Lab at Barnard.

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, jamming the riso printer at Now Place, or hovering behind the fiction at Unity Books.

My computational poetry and new media projects are featured in The New River and Taper. My illustrations appear in The Seventh Wave, Sine Theta, and QueerAF. You can find my creative writing in Kernel, bad apple, and Starling, among others.

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!