{"id":11968,"date":"2025-04-02T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.golive.clarku.edu\/news\/?post_type=story&p=11968"},"modified":"2025-04-18T10:39:35","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T14:39:35","slug":"from-art-to-code-to-games","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/2025\/04\/02\/from-art-to-code-to-games\/","title":{"rendered":"From art to code to games"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Larriyah Graham \u201925 comes from a family of artists \u2014 photographers, graffiti artists, sketchers, and crocheters. Their great-great-grandmother was one of the famous quiltmakers of Gee\u2019s Bend<\/a>, Alabama, whose exquisite blankets have been exhibited in museums across the country, including the Smithsonian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graham is living beyond anything their ancestor could have imagined, designing art using pixels and code instead of needle and thread and securing a job offer at one of the world\u2019s largest and most recognizable corporations by the time they graduated from college. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a story unique to the Brooklyn-raised Graham, an interactive media<\/a> major with minors in computer science<\/a> and Asian studies<\/a> who has who has been offered a software engineering position at Amazon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The valedictorian of their high school class, Graham, the second of four children, knew their parents would not be able to afford their college education and that they needed to find alternative funding. They\u2019d taken AP computer science and was learning coding through a program called Code Nation when they found an avenue to Clark as the recipient of the Amazon Future Engineer Scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was truly blessed, because I did not know how I was going to figure out college,\u201d Graham recalls. \u201cWhen I found out I would be able to go to school, I felt, \u2018Well, this is beautiful. This is awesome.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/span>\"Larriyah
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<\/span>\"Larriyah
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<\/span>\"Larriyah
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Graham came to Clark in 2021, prepared to continue on a path of study heavily focused on computer science, and they acknowledge that the early courses were all-consuming.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During sophomore year, Graham spent a Study Abroad semester in Japan, where they had something of an epiphany. They took history and language classes, worked on Japanese-speaking skills, and became entranced with a game design course that introduced them not only to the technical underpinnings of the art form, but also the storytelling components that make a game come alive for the user. The cross-cultural conversations with the instructor, a Japanese man eager for insight into the American mindset, they say, were \u201ceye-opening.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt gave me joy,\u201d they remember. \u201cI definitely got a wider perception of the world, and what I wanted to do in it.\u201d By the time they returned to Clark, they\u2019d already made up their mind to change majors to interactive media through the Becker School of Design & Technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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