Alex celebrated the small pleasures and joys of daily life, bringing her friends and family along for the celebration. She was a shooting star, energetic, bold, fearless, an ultramarathoner. Photos of Alex at the finish line of the Vermont 100 show her beaming, thumbs up, no sign that she had been in motion for 27 hours. She greeted life with an optimistic, thumbs up way of living, always looking for opportunities to offer kindness and attention to others.

A Harvard graduate with a degree in East Asian Studies, fluent in Mandarin, Alex lived in China, pushing boundaries of what is possible in art and questioning where art is made. In one Shanghai project, Alex created art to commemorate a restaurant the day before it was scheduled for demolition, embroidering tablecloths with the words and gestures of patrons’ conversations. At Google, where she worked as a writer, designer, and product manager, Alex helped shape Google’s platforms for accessibility, developed
creative solutions for new products and platforms, and crafted language and content guidelines to enhance ease of use.

Alex met her husband Brian Watterson at Yale Graduate School of Art, and together they shared a spirit of adventure, a love of pizza and wildflowers, Provincetown and Tokyo. They designed their Maplewood, NJ home with a Japanese aesthetic, uncluttered, tranquil, with calm beauty in each room. Alex loved birthdays and balloons; pandas and popsicles; Japanese fashion designers and sushi; poetry of Mary Oliver and the art of Yayoi Kusama; and she loved dresses with pockets. She dearly loved her sister Rachel, her niece Lailah, and nephew Oren, the future tense as she called them. Alex contained multitudes; she lived life with gratitude and generosity of spirit. She left this earth in the middle of her story. Too soon.