Virtual Rebel

It was 2018, and Daniella Uchendu-Oji, TFM ’20, was lost.  

Two years earlier, the Houston native moved back to the U.S. for the first time since infancy, having spent most of her two decades in Lagos, Nigeria. Her parents and two siblings remained overseas as Uchendu-Oji pursued her dreams of studying digital design in the strange new city of Philadelphia. 

But nothing went according to plan: she encountered an abusive situation with her residential hosts, struggled with her grades at Drexel University, lost her funding source for tuition and even was the victim of identity theft—leaving her credit score a mess.  

“I had to start all over again,” Uchendu-Oji recalled. 

Learning by heart

Spunky by nature, there was no calling it quits for Uchendu-Oji. She applied to new schools and called every student loan company she could find. Eventually, she cobbled together a second act.  

It paid off: Temple extended an acceptance letter and scholarship money, and Uchendu-Oji has tasted little else besides success in the four years since. 

“I feel like once I got to Temple, I was supposed to be there the whole time. It felt more natural,” Uchendu-Oji said. “I was in a place where I didn’t have to act like anything I wasn’t.” 

Designing woman

After graduation, Uchendu-Oji worked a few freelance and short-term gigs until getting her big break just a year later. Apparel giant Adidas launched an innovative new in-house creative hub, Studio A, and a colleague passed her name to the studio’s art director. Uchendu-Oji was brought on board, and now primarily spends her days designing attention-grabbing art for billboards, commercials, digital ad campaigns, social media channels, websites and more. 

Her freelancing hustle has also taken off, perhaps most notably her work creating textual elements for I Run with Maud, an ESPN documentary detailing the aftermath of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man pursued and killed by three white men while jogging in a suburban Georgia neighborhood in 2020. 

“They allowed me to go through the creative process and be as experimental as I could be,” Uchendu-Oji said of the documentary’s producers. “That was a perfect example of me blending my interests to create something.”

Replicating reality 

Growing up in working class neighborhoods of a developing nation, she says there was little support for a life of whimsy. Most students were to select a career path by their earlier teenage years, and pursuit of anything other than meat-and-potato professions in medicine, law, or engineering was considered a ticket to failure. 

Undeterred, Uchendu-Oji focused on the arts. She and fellow classmates rabble-roused, organizing a student arts festival and raising money to pay for it. The effort was so successful they flipped the position of a key school administrator, who doubled down by providing additional funding to hire a DJ and decorate the space. 

“I think that’s just who I am,” Uchendu-Oji says. “Wherever I go I try to logically understand how a society is. And if it doesn’t make sense … I start to be rebellious.” 

Now, Uchendu-Oji wants to apply her outlook on much larger horizons. She sees the world balancing on a precipice between real and virtual and believes 3D designers will be essential in building what comes next.  

Picture a world in which instead of FaceTiming a loved one, you sit in your living room and converse with their lifelike hologram beside you. Or, instead of the doldrums of Brady Bunch-style Zoom meetings, you enter a fully three-dimensional virtual conference room. That’s the future she plans to help build. 

“It’s replicating the world,” Uchendu-Oji said. “In a couple of years, designers are going to be heavily, heavily depended on.”