ZOÉ ISHEE
Zoé Ishee
About her & her achievements
Incoming Ph.D. student, City University of
New York, Neuroscience Collaborative: Psychology
(Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience)
Artist, Writer, Human, Being, Science Purveyor, etcetera
want my cv?
New York, Neuroscience Collaborative: Psychology
(Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience)
Artist, Writer, Human, Being, Science Purveyor, etcetera
want my cv?
My only social media:
Tiktok - iamdialogue
Instagram - neptewns
facebook - zoé ishee art
Tiktok - iamdialogue
Instagram - neptewns
facebook - zoé ishee art
I am Neptewns!
My name is Zoé Ishee, and I’m 22.
Drawing feels like the oldest friend I know; I can’t recall a time when I haven’t drawn. I’ve always had an ardor to express myself in whatever way I could. I love learning about and experiencing the weird world through creativity.
I grew up in Mississippi. I graduated from Mississippi State University in May of 2025 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, (+ Cognitive Science).
As I mentioned, I have always felt that creativity was integral to my being, but my professional art career began at 17 when I created my first commercial commission. This was the inaugural poster for a new arts and music festival in Jackson, MS, the state’s capital: Mississippi Maker’s Fest. *Organized by MDAH & The Two Mississippi Museums.
In hindsight, I realize that I was doing art things in grade school the way my peers were doing academia things. At the time, I had a different preference for learning.
Around then, I was also represented locally by Pacesetter Fine Arts Gallery, and was grateful to be the youngest among 50+ MS artists and artisans. I trademarked 'neptewns' to mark my growth.
why the name, ‘’neptewns?’’
If you were on the internet in the 2010s, poking around on Tumblr or somewhere adjacent, you might’ve become aware of a trend where people achieved short, succinct, and interesting usernames through various means. Not to call anyone out specifically, but you’d see users like “toad” and “midnight.” As platforms like Instagram became more popular, snagging these names became increasingly difficult. After spending hours and using up all the dopamine of your youth trying to secure single-word names and being met with the red “user is taken, idiot” message, many eventually resorted to making up their own usernames. This led to a necessary spin on single-word handles. Names that sounded like real words but were creatively born from internet lingo languages. One of my best friends, Leah, had a range of usernames in that internet era: @nodal, @rug, @pexia, @lebia, @cybinade, etc. She is older than me, a junior when I was a little freshman in high school. Uh-oh Leah, it’s true, I looked up to you.
The trend was a way of curating the online experience for yourself and for the people looking at your stuff. Of course, that’s still important to many people. If you’ve seen *The Social Network*, this is how the internet self-persona evolves. That was a strange, particular moment in time when random friends from your algebra class were literally famous on the internet, mostly for having “spam” accounts that showcased their personality through images ideally in 1080x1080px. It’s honestly fascinating if you think about the social implications that led to that era. I am not precisely sure the best way to explain how some people gained traction, but I bet the usernames helped. Wink.
So that’s where neptewns came from. Neptune - taken. Neptewn - taken. YES! I was 14 when I first assigned the name to my brand new account that would host my artworks.
If you made it to the end of this prose stuff and liked it at all, there’s more hidden here.