zelda’s personal bio and contribution statement [02.21.2023]

Zelda Marcela Montes is a non-binary Latine software engineer and first-year M.A. student in Digital Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center. After learning how to code in a high school summer program, Zelda continued pursuing their interest in technology, ultimately graduating from Yale University with a B.A. in Computer Science in May of 2022. Throughout their time at Yale, Zelda worked multiple part-time jobs and served in community roles advocating for underrepresented and marginalized folks in tech during the semester, and worked multiple Software Engineering and Data Science internships during the summers. Zelda’s research interests include urban, gender, and ethnic studies, and they are often looking for ways to bring these areas of passion into the work they do in technology.

Zelda joined More Than Surviving as Lead Developer and Data Management Designer. They are responsible for creating the web application in Python and Django, designing the API to handle PostgreSQL database management, and  constructing the interactive map of Wampanoag political events from 1830-1850, using MapBox GL JS and GeoJSON.