Amanda Kamen Phingbodhipakkiya and Jason Yue Shen were married April 26 at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. Belinda Ju, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life Minister for the event, officiated.
The bride, 30, is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist whose works, including sculptures, paintings and augmented reality apps, aim to help people better understand scientific data and research. She is currently preparing for a solo art exhibition in mid-September called “Connective Tissue” at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas. She graduated from Columbia and received a master of fine arts degree from Pratt Institute. She is a daughter of Frida Y. Murdomo and Tom Phingbodhipakkiy of Norcross, Ga. The bride’s father retired as the owner of several Thai restaurants in the Atlanta area. Her mother was a stay-at-home parent.
The groom, 32, is a founder of Midgame, an esports and gaming analytics software company in Manhattan. He also serves on the board of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation, which is based in Washington. He graduated with honors from Stanford, where he also received a master’s degree in biology and was a captain of the men’s gymnastics team that won the Division I National Collegiate Athletic Association championship in 2009.
He is the son of Shixin Mao and Anping Shen of Newton, Mass. The groom’s mother is a coach at the Massachusetts Gymnastics Center in Waltham, Mass; she coached the 2016 Rio Olympics gymnast Houry Gebeshian. His father is a data analyst at the Massachusetts Department of Education in Malden, Mass., and an elected member of the Newton School Committee.
The couple met in the fall of 2014 as co-workers in the marketing department of a software company in Manhattan. She initially saw him as a “dumb jock,” and “wrote him off,” she said, “as someone not worth getting to know.”
But her impression of him changed when they were asked to lead a promotional campaign for the company and she discovered he had lots of great ideas.
“I knew he was good-looking, but he absolutely surprised me with his intellect,” Ms. Phingbodhipakkiya said. “He was someone who could brainstorm and turn out ideas like magic, he was just brilliant that way.”
Through the project, they discovered they had many things in common. Both studied life science but pursued careers elsewhere, had personal side projects in writing and art, and numerous scars on their left knees. She was a classically trained ballerina before a skiing accident severely injured her knee in college, while he suffered a major knee injury during an National Collegiate Athletic Association gymnastics competition.
“Once we really got to know each other, we formed a great friendship built on admiration and respect,” Ms. Phingbodhipakkiya said. “It was the start of a really beautiful journey.”
In October 2015, a year after meeting — each had since moved on to other jobs — their journey crossed the line from friendship to relationship in a single kiss initiated by Mr. Shen in front of a restaurant on the Lower East Side.
“It’s always scary to make that leap, but I just put it in my mind that I was going to go for it, and I did,” he said. “She responded pretty well to my kiss, which was a great sign.”
They became serious and moved into an apartment together in September 2016.
“I found her to be a great collaborator not only at work but in life,” Mr. Shen said. “She has a lot of ambition, as I do, and we are both able to pursue individual dreams without taking over each other’s lives.”
In November 2017, Mr. Shen proposed with an SMS chatbot that he built and coded, which sent messages to his soon-to-be-fiancée that led her on a scavenger hunt across New York City.
This particular journey began at the Brooklyn Bridge and concluded in Central Park, where a Star Wars BB-8 robot was sitting and waiting patiently with a paper note asking “Will You Marry Me?”
