Zinzy Waleson Geene

I’m a life-long student, an Internet diarist, an amateur musician, a loving partner and dog mother, and subversively privileged human. A professional albeit boring tagline would be:

Senior Product Designer of 17 years who deploys skills in research, design, strategy, and leadership to demonstrate that taking care of users is good for business.

I like to think there’s more to life than that.

Before you dive in, you may be looking for a way to say hello, follow this site, or check out what I’m up to right now.

I’m specialized in making software for people at work.

I taught myself to build websites in elementary school in the late nineties, and began working from my one-person design studio when I turned 18. I had entirely different plans for my future, but in the meantime, I’ve found a very satisfying home in Information Technology.

I’ve worked as a designer, researcher, strategist, product manager, and design manager. Right now, I’m living the dream at Gerimedica. If you’d like to learn more about the type of work I’m doing at the moment, please visit Work.

I hold a B.A. in Linguistics & Literature from Utrecht University, and dropped out of Theological Seminary after a year of being the only queer Black person there. I think I’m still saving my Master’s degree for Divinity School.

I seek to go to bed more content, more aware, and smarter than I woke up.

I’m one of those privileged people who wake up feeling 8+. I get to surround myself with people in whom I see myself, I live in a beautiful home, and my career is a hobby I do during office hours.

If you meet me in person, you’ll see I like to laugh a lot. It’s not fake, either. I’m just really thankful to be where I am today. I didn’t have the easiest of starts, and it shows in who I am and how I write. Life is like a box of chocolates.

I live and work in Amsterdam, where I share my life with Anja and Lemonade.

Lemonade is a dog, but since we’re a child-free home I consider Lemonade my daughter. I kind of hate that about myself. If you’ve never met Anja, you should. She’s quite something.

I’m of São Toméan and Dutch descent, and come from a long line of loud, burgundian band geeks. I grew up in the narrow tail-end of the Netherlands, bike rides away from both Belgium and Germany.

Being a Black, lesbian, non-binary, neurodivergent person with a history of adverse childhood experiences hasn’t always been an easy life path, but luckily I began to feel a sense of belonging when I moved to Amsterdam.

I like chronicling my life in a diary

In various forms and frequencies, I’ve been keeping a diary since I was a little kid. You may consider this website an extension of that. I’m an advocate for the IndieWeb, which is a snooty way of saying I think the Internet should be scattered, playful, experimental, personal, and cozy.

My Xhosa name was inspired by Nelson Mandela’s daughter Zindziswa. If I had been a boy, you would’ve had to call me Stevie Wonder Waleson Geene.

I’ve been sober since May 2018.