neptewns
      
                     
Zoé Ishee About & achievements






for art inquiries email zoeishee at outlook.com

for neuroscience inquiries email zishee at gc.cuny.edu

Ph.D. student at City University of New York, The Graduate Center
Neuroscience Collaborative: Psychology: Behavioral Cognitive Neuroscience
I am a Mississippi-born creative and aspiring neuroscientist exploring behavior, cognition, and how we create and navigate meaning through research and art. I’m a folk singer and musician. I have a history of working with and caring for young children.

I have a particularly fervent fascination with our relationship to ourselves (perception and understanding) 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. 
📄 CV






representative
articles & 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, Writing, and Exploring... These are the oldest friends I know.
My being is central to learning about, experiencing, and expressing the weird world through creativity.





I graduated from Mississippi State University in May 2025 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. My studies focused on cognitive science.


Columbus, Mississippi
Graduation!
Starkville, Mississippi

 Around 14, I created an Instagram page that would be dedicated to hosting my artworks: “@neptewns”.
Through the years, I met folks and sold my artwork in various forms. At seventeen, the professional art world opened up for me 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 and The Two Mississippi Museums. The work won a Silver Award at the Southeast Museums Conference!

    I was doing art things in school the way my peers were doing academic things. I won some awards - Among these, the prestigious Scholastic Silver Key! Eek. I was represented by a Fine Arts Gallery, and was the youngest among more than 50 MS artists and artisans.  I trademarked ‘neptewns’ to make things official.


Self Portrait, 14 years old




Why Neptewns?
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 1846 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 20th, 1989.


Voyager 2's view of Neptune from 35 million miles away. NASA/JPL: From CNN




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 “user is taken” 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!

Also... I like science.

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