Zoé IsheeAbout & achievements

I am a  Mississippi-born creative and aspiring neuroscientist exploring behavior, cognition, and how we create and navigate meaning through research and art.  

I have a particularly fervent fascination with our relationship to ourselves that I eagerly explore through Neuroscience, Psychology, Philosophy, and Art. The common through-line of my art is the challenging and meta-exploration of all available facets of our strange reality (or realities), often with humor. I’m always eager to learn more about how perception and understanding are constructed, and what role we may play in shaping them. 

I also have a history of working with and caring for young children.


📄 CV


representative articles and media

Erter, Erin. “Zoé Ishee Combines 
Art and Science.” The Reflector, 22 Oct. 2024

Rochester, Abigail Sipe. “Student-Led Neuroscience
Club Leads to New Minor at MSU.” The Dispatch, 14 Apr. 2025








Hi!
I’m Zoé. I’m 23.

Drawing and writing feel like the oldest friends I know.
My being is central to learning about, experiencing,
and expressing 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. I also studied Cognitive Science.


Maddie with Porch Bones, Gifts from a Scientist Friend. Starkville, Mississippi



I have always felt that creativity was integral to my being.
But my professional art career began on paper around age
seventeen when I created my first commercial commission, which 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 and The Two Mississippi Museums.
The art won a Silver Award at the Southeast Museums Conference!



16 years




teenage me

At that time, I was doing art things in school
the way my peers were doing academia things.
I was represented by a local Fine Arts Gallery, and was the youngest among more than fifty MS artists and artisans there!

I trademarked 'neptewns' to make things official.

Why Neptewns?


Voyager 2's view of Neptune from 35 million miles away. NASA/JPL: From CNN
Firstly, some Neptune facts:
    It’s known for its deep blue color, which comes from methane gas in its atmosphere.
The planet has the strongest winds in the solar system. It’s the only planet not visible to the naked eye.

   It was discovered in eighteen forty six through mathematical calculations, after astronomers noticed its gravitational effect on Uranus. It was first visualized in the summer of nineteen eighty nine when NASA's Voyager Two spacecraft flew by.

The first close-ups were captured on
August twenty, nineteen eighty nine.

  


     If you were (chronically) 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.

   That’s where neptewns came from. 

    Neptune - taken. 
Neptewn - taken.
Neptewns? - YES!

I also like science.

    I was 14 when I first assigned the name to my 
brand new account that would host my artworks. 

Even though I mostly just go by my name now - there’s your insight into that lore.

If you made it to the end of this prose
stuff and liked it at all, there’s more hidden here.