Meet Me, Brenna

I believe in the immense power of illuminating worlds otherwise unseen.

I attended my undergraduate studies at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, MI, with a major in biology and minor in biochemistry. While my undergraduate career was mostly full of science lectures and labs, I have always enjoyed artistic expression, mainly through dance. In my final year at Hillsdale, I decided to enroll in visual art classes that revealed my talent for drawing, graphic design, and sculpture. After graduation in 2018, l worked in a clinical microbiology lab at Munson Medical Center, in Traverse City, MI.

In the summer of 2019, I decided to pursue art further and began apprenticing with my former art professor, Anthony Frudakis, sculpting large scale human figures and learning about anatomy from the sculptor’s perspective. In 2020, I was accepted to the University of Illinois at Chicago for a Master of Science in biomedical visualization and am currently in my last semester of graduate school.

While it was not a straight path to medical illustration, I am undoubtedly grateful that I decided to put confidence in my artistic abilities and pursue this field. Being able to continuously learn and discover new concepts in biomedicine and tell those stories in a creative light is what I enjoy most about the work of a medical illustrator. I believe in the immense power of visualizing scientific concepts and illuminating worlds otherwise unseen. Currently, I express this through my work in graphic design, 3D modeling, and animation.

Outside of biomedical visualization, I like to spend my time bouldering, gardening, or on Lake Michigan.