Kara Piepenbrink

Hi I’m Kara Piepenbrink, I work in the tech writing department as a Junior Content Curator. I’m so happy to be a part of iFixit and its mission to Fix the World!

I graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2020 with a bachelor's in fine arts in Graphic Design. I have loved art since I was a kid and now have grown to love the visual language used across so many different mediums. One particular culture and style of art that I appreciate is traditional and contemporary Japanese art and culture. While at UCF I took Japanese as my foreign language class and joined the UCF Japanese language club, Nihongo Kenkyukai. There I got the opportunity to become the vice president of the club and integrate myself in learning the language and spreading Japanese culture to others.

After college, I got my first job as a production artist at a local promotional products company. There, I was able to get hands-on experience with each process of how branding was put onto various products. My favorite and most used tool were the CO2 lasers, which were used mainly for engraving onto stainless steel cups. Despite having no prior experience fixing or doing maintenance on any kind of machine, I was trained and taught how to do various upkeep and repairs on the lasers. Eventually, I was able to get the hang of it and was later tasked with doing maintenance for the rotaries inside of all 20 lasers.

Since then, I have to check out every booth or place where I see laser engraving and find out what laser and materials they use. I have also done some laser engraving for my personal art projects and plan to make a lot more!

Aside from making art, I love various Japanese pop culture like anime and enjoy playing video games and board games. A fun fact about me is that I am a regular at the local cat cafe, Naughty Cat Cafe in Chattanooga. It has become one of my favorite hangout spots and was also the place where I was able to adopt my cat, Lillie.