Elisa Ngan is a transdisciplinary experience designer, operations researcher, and visual poet. Her installations, publications, projects, products, and pedagogies are traversal vignettes navigating the emergent contingencies between truth, goodness, and beauty in contemporary data cultures.

Trained at the nexus of design, culture, and structure, Elisa has a Masters in Design Engineering from Harvard Graduate School of Design and is a candidate for the Masters of Fine Arts in Design Media Arts at UCLA. She has taught, lectured, and served as a design critic at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Parsons School of Design, Boston Architectural College, and Lawrence Technological University.
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In 2022, Elisa founded Amodal Completions LLC, a data design practice focused on researching, forecasting, and worlding the new roles, organizations, and operational workflows that need to emerge as scaffolding with frontier data-driven technology. Amodal's mission is to territorialize and amplify the most human of human intelligence by creating tools that probe the past, present, and future of data as feedback loop between humans, machines, and nature.

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Elisa's creative research started as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, where she received her B.A. in Architecture with minors in "City & Regional Planning" and "Environmental Design & Urbanism in Developing Countries." She was one of the last classes to graduate under the old degree requirements that allowed optional upperclass studios before being revamped by Tom Buresh. With UC Berkeley's trailblazing history of securing rights for the disability community, Elisa's hearing loss qualified her for the generous Disabled Students Program (DSP) at the school, which granted her the ability to take any class she wanted without being waitlisted at a time when UC Regents were facing fierce budget cuts and classroom over-enrollment along with the recession and housing crisis every professor in her program seemed intent on lecturing about.

While at Berkeley she was particularly drawn to embodiment and drawing as learning mechanisms as well as architecture history & theory. She leveraged DSP and her electives to pursue the ideas being taught in the Symbolic Systems program at Stanford, exploring intersections between the built environment, perception, and language.

Since then she has used her practice in software working in climate-critical domains that enable her to understand the social truths of how the built environment gets built with software.