Carolanne’s website contact, projects, notes, art

Projects & Experience

Some things I’ve spent time on in the past, last updated September 2026

Manifest

Organizer

April–June 2026

Manifest is an annual conference about prediction markets and forecasting. I ran Manifest 2026 along with one other full-time organizer, and we raised ~700k in revenue via ticket sales & sponsorships.

Group photo of Manifest attendees in a backyard
Attendees playing chess at night under string lights at Manifest

In more detail:

See an (incomplete) write-up of things I learned from running Manifest here.

For references, talk to Austin Chen (my boss, co-founder of Manifund and Manifold).

Generator Residency

Resident

June–September 2026

“Generator is a 3-month residency where residents pitch, build, and ship projects that build capacity and infrastructure across the AI safety ecosystem.” During Generator, I worked for Nightingale, an emergency response capacity organization; ran a launch event for AI2040: Plan A with Afitab Iyigun; organized and attended a one-week rapid-upskilling AI safety bootcamp for ~30 participants with Saul Munn that was taught primarily by Sydney von Arx; did day-of logistics & operation work for some retreats; and other miscellaneous generalist-shaped work (which I’m happy to share in more detail in private).

For references, talk to Saul Munn or Sydney von Arx.

UChicago Effective Altruism

Organizer / Board Member

January 2026–now

I helped organize UChicago Effective Altruism, mainly coordinating and developing outreach strategies, representing the organization at club fairs & events, and meeting with club members one-on-one.

For references, talk to Noah Birnbaum, Alice Cai, or Madeleine Hoffman.

Undergraduate degree

I am currently on leave from my undergraduate degree in Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

During my time there, my favorite classes were the social science core sequence Self, Culture, and Society; the humanities core sequence Human Being and Citizen; Introduction to Logic (proof systems for both propositional and first-order predicate logic); and a course on Modernism with Agnes Callard. My other most cherished memories include attending Night Owls, the UChicago Rationality reading group, and trekking to a Hannah Arendt reading group (in the frozen depths of winter).

Art

In a past life I made a lot of art. I primarily worked in oil paint, with some acrylic, watercolor, porcelain, stoneware, and other mediums. I’ve probably spent 7,000–10,000 hours practicing art and a few hundred teaching, and I see it as having been quite formative in how I see the world.

see more here
Self Absorbed Family Portrait

Oil on Canvas, 63×70 inches, 2024

Skills
  • I can speak, read, and write Mandarin at a native level, and my German is intermediate (~B1)
  • various common productivity and collaboration tools (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Airtable, Notion, Slack, and Discord), and figuring out ways to integrate LLMs into them
    • trying to automate as much as possible (in the spirit of Oliver Habryka’s post here)
  • graphic design, UI/UX design (writing a skimmable, information-dense email, formatting text, making intuitive UI design choices for vibe-coded software, etc.)
    • Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Figma, and Procreate, although they are mostly obsolete in the age of Claude Design / LLMs
    • making Claude-made designs not look like they were made by Claude
  • running 30–1,000 person events end-to-end
  • extremely basic coding, enough to get LLMs to do most things for me

other random, not work-related, miscellaneous skills:

  • Woodworking: basic furniture carpentry & operating power tools (enough to build a table, a bookshelf, or other functional furniture & to fix most things, but not enough to build the skeletal framework of a house)
  • Ceramics: wheel throwing up to ~30 pounds of stoneware & porcelain, firing gas kilns, mixing glazes, and running a ceramics studio end-to-end
  • Apparel: pattern drafting, sewing, making semi-professional-level garments, and the basics of tailoring
  • Film and analogue photography: enough to take semi-professional-level photos for your events, and I can comfortably develop my own film end-to-end.