A painting is like a journal, says Kristin Yee. “It’s a log of how you felt on the different days you were creating it. You remember what you were thinking when you were working on certain parts.”
When Yee revisits her painting And I Partook, its meaning continues to evolve. “What it represents changes as time passes,” Yee says. “Because I’m different, it becomes different to me.”
The painting, a depiction of the Savior as He is contemplating and preparing for His atoning sacrifice, hangs in Yee’s office as she serves as second counselor in the Relief Society general presidency. It’s a reminder, she says, of the power of divine guidance: “If you want Him involved, you let Him lead.”
Yee’s life has been punctuated by pivotal moments—instances when she has accepted opportunities and drawn upon her faith to see them through. “Raising your hand and trying new things takes you places,” she observes. “I think the Lord wants to show us what we can do with His help.”
Being open to invitations led Yee to Disney Interactive Studios—where she worked for 13 years, first as a concept and texture artist and later as a producer—and then to managing the Church’s animation team, a role she took on in 2016 just weeks before she began BYU Marriott’s executive MPA program.
“It requires a lot of faith to start with a white canvas,” Yee says of painting and of life. “All of us do that in some form: We start with a white canvas and wonder where it’s going to go.”
Good Enough to Be an Artist
Blank sheets of paper in Yee’s childhood home didn’t last long. Yee was often found with crayons in hand, coloring on construction paper or on white typing paper.
“I drew all the time. I used to draw comic book characters because my older brother loved comic books,” she says. This evolved into drawing Disney characters because “you always want to draw what’s in the movies.” Even her math homework would get submitted with drawings she thought would enhance the assignment.
When eight-year-old Yee created a card with the mermaid Ariel sitting in a sea of blue construction paper, her mother displayed it in their home. “Kristin,” she said, “you could really do something with your art someday.” That simple but powerful validation led to a realization for Yee: “I thought to myself, Maybe I’m good enough to be an artist.”
As she grew, Yee moved from crayon to ink, ink to pencil, pencil to colored pencil, and colored pencil to watercolor. Then in college, Yee began painting with acrylics and oil. Throughout Yee’s artistic endeavors, her mother’s comment stuck with her. “My mother had a great influence on what I thought I could do,” Yee says.
The summer before Yee started junior high, her parents moved their family of seven from Sacramento, California, to Burley, Idaho, a city touted by a family friend as a great place to raise children. “We saw rodeos for the first time and learned that cowboys were real,” Yee notes. She went from her Sacramento school where students spoke upward of 20 languages to a junior high where she was one of a few non-Caucasian students.
There were other small-town adjustments too. “At first it was strange to see members of our ward in the grocery store,” she recalls. “In Sacramento you only saw people from church at church.”
Yee gratefully adapted to the changes well and immersed herself in the half-acre backyard that sustained an orchard and a large garden. “We really sweat it out as kids. We weeded all summer long,” she says. “We put in sprinkler lines, planted seeds, pruned trees, and canned fruit.”
As the family garden grew, so did Yee’s passion for art. Her junior high art teacher would display her pieces in his class window. Yee painted windows for businesses, backdrops for an opera house, and posters and imagery for church and school events. She also entered art contests. “I was so busy with art, I didn’t worry about fitting in,” Yee says. “Art was how I served and shared who I was.”
Yee had a studious side too. “I loved science and math,” she says, noting that her dad is a biochemist. “I was one of those kids who wanted to get good grades, so I spent a lot of time on homework. I was always up way past midnight working on assignments,” she remembers, adding, “I haven’t slept much since I was 12 years old.”
A Blank Canvas
Yee’s fierce determination took her back to California not long after she turned 17.
She had graduated early from high school after her sophomore year, enrolled in local college courses, and cashiered at a café to save money for art school. Twelve months later, Yee found herself in San Francisco living in student housing with 49 women from around the world who were also enrolled in the Academy of Art University’s summer semester.
“I remember being dropped off, opening a bank account, and going grocery shopping,” she says of her arrival in San Francisco. “The ketchup was way too expensive.”
Yee enjoyed the challenge of being on her own and learning from different artists. “You grow when you’re surrounded by talented people,” she says. “While I was learning a lot about myself, I also learned what I wanted with the gospel.”
After a couple of busy weeks in San Francisco, Yee noticed an empty feeling growing inside of her—“I knew I needed the Savior’s light,” she recalls—and she sought out The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the phone book. As Yee stepped into church that following Sunday, she immediately felt at home. “For the first time, I was choosing the gospel in a new way,” she says. “I realize now that was the main reason I went to art school: to learn about the Lord and my personal relationship with Him.”
As the semester continued, Yee began to feel as if there was somewhere else she needed to be. After a short stay in Sacramento with her grandparents, Yee enrolled at Ricks College—an unexpected destination—where she continued her art studies and loaded up on math and science classes as well. “It was a perfect place for me to land and nourish my growing testimony,” she says.
The promptings that guided her from San Francisco to Rexburg taught Yee to trust God, not only in the large decisions but also in the day-to-day choices—a spiritual skill she would continue to rely on.
The Best of Both Worlds
While Yee was pursuing her illustration degree after transferring from Ricks to BYU, an animation instructor visited her class with an invitation to collaborate. “Animation and illustration are two separate careers—and two different BYU departments—but the instructor needed illustrators who could help with character design, concept art, color schemes, textures, and backgrounds,” Yee explains. “BYU was still fairly new in the animation realm, but they were quickly becoming well known.”
A few awkward seconds passed after the request. Yee looked around at her classmates, who weren’t showing interest, then back at the patiently waiting instructor.
Yee raised her hand. “I hadn’t done anything like that before, but I thought it sounded cool,” she says. “The project, Pet Shop, ended up being so much fun that I volunteered to help with another animation, Noggin.”
A senior at the time, Yee got to know the animation students well. One of them encouraged her to apply for an internship with Avalanche Software, a video game company based in Salt Lake City that was recruiting at BYU. Yee initially hesitated, but her friend insisted: “Just show them your portfolio for that experience.”
Yee soon found herself in a room with an art director. “He was flipping through my portfolio, not saying a word. When he finished, he just said, ‘Okay, thank you.’ I thanked him, grabbed my portfolio, and left quickly,” she recalls. “I thought I would never hear from him.”
But she did—he called and offered her an internship in 3D painting for game design. Once again, Yee found herself thinking, I’ve never done that before, but I’ll give it a try.
The internship turned into a full-time position at Avalanche. “Because I volunteered to help the animation team do something I’d never done before, I met with a company I never would have met otherwise, then I accepted a job I never would have been offered and learned how to do something that was part of what I was supposed to do,” she says.
That wasn’t the only happy coincidence. Growing up, Yee had set her sights on working for Disney—“I loved the stories and how they were portrayed”—and not long after she was hired, Disney acquired Avalanche.
Early in her Disney career, Yee was presented with a new opportunity within the organization—the chance to produce and design the Hannah Montana: Spotlight World Tour video game. It was an unfamiliar arena, but Yee, drawing from her past experiences, agreed. Despite some design and engineering challenges—the game was produced on the Wii platform, which was new to the studio—it became Disney’s top-selling video game up to that point.
Yee was a producer from then on. “The Lord was merciful in helping us succeed at something we had never done. I both enjoyed and was challenged by the new role of producer and bringing people together to solve problems and work toward a common goal,” she says. “It was a project that shifted a lot of people’s careers. Had I not tried this as a rookie, my career would have ended up in a different lane.”
Creating a New Space
The deadlines at Disney were intense, but so was the creativity. “It was exciting—we were working with Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel, among others—but it came at a cost,” Yee says. “There was a lot of overtime, which is just part of the industry. I slept at the office sometimes.”
Because it was hard to break away from work, Yee, a Young Women advisor in her ward, decided to attend Young Women camp for only one day in summer 2015. When she returned to the office after her day at camp, however, she felt uneasy.
“I remember standing there, taking a moment to process the feeling. Then I turned to my coworker and said, ‘I need to leave.’ I just walked out, drove up the mountain, saw those girls, and had a wonderful time. It was exactly where I was supposed to be,” Yee says. “Not long after that, I became the ward Young Women president.”
Six months later, Yee felt a similar—and equally surprising—prompting. Despite being senior producer on the Disney Infinity video games, something told her she “needed to be somewhere else” after 13 years with the studio. “It was the same voice saying, ‘You’ve let go of something before; you can trust me again,’” she recalls. “I was a mess in so many ways. I wasn’t just leaving a career; my coworkers were like family. But I also felt peace.”
As Yee took a leap of faith and stepped away from the corporate world to recenter her life, she tried to put together a plan for her next steps. She learned later that “the plan was not to have a plan. It probably didn’t seem wise for a single woman to leave a career behind without another opportunity,” she continues, “but I learned who I was to my Heavenly Father—minus my career, minus my status, and minus my title.”
11th-Hour Application
Not long into Yee’s professional break, she found herself sick in bed one Sunday.
As Yee was reading church talks, she came across remarks from Linda K. Burton, then the Relief Society general president, about serving refugees. Yee found herself wondering, What kinds of careers could help with issues like this?
She dove into researching jobs and graduate programs online and landed on BYU Marriott’s EMPA website. “It seemed like a really nice fit,” she says.
The only hitch? Applications were due in a few days. Yee brushed off the idea in favor of composing a more thoughtful application down the road, but the next morning she woke up feeling anxious—sick in a way different from the cold she was fighting.
“I realized I was supposed to apply for the program now,” she says. It was a scramble, especially since Yee was flying to Reno, Nevada, two days later. “I approached the Lord, saying, ‘I will do everything I can, but if a transcript doesn’t come through or an interview doesn’t work out, then it’s not meant to be,’” she says. “It seemed like He responded, ‘No problem.’”
Yee wrote her letter of intent during the flight as she worked against the clock. “I had so many people helping me left and right. Everyone was so gracious.” And when Yee’s acceptance letter arrived, it took a few minutes to realize what had transpired. Oh, my goodness, she thought, I’m going to school again.
Yee’s promptings to leave her job and later to apply to grad school became clearer when the studio she’d left two months before shut down abruptly.
If Yee had been there when it shuttered, “my life could have gone a lot of different ways,” she reflects. “But I was recentering and searching for what the Lord would have me do versus being completely shaken and desperately grabbing on to the next thing. What I thought was stable was not. I learned that true stability comes through our faith in Jesus Christ. I’m so glad the Lord gives us opportunities to choose Him. It’s powerful, and it’s part of our divine nature to exercise that agency.”
As Yee pursued her studies, she absorbed the material and grew close to her classmates. “Everybody was trying to support each other. I loved that,” she says. “We were already in the middle of life and careers; going to school was a great leap of faith for everyone, which required us to help one another.”
The Bigger Picture
Not long after Yee submitted her EMPA application, she completed an additional application—this time for a job in the Church’s animation department.
At first, Yee was reluctant to consider the position. She was just weeks into her time away from work and hadn’t even gone on a proper hike yet. And as Young Women president, she was busy planning camp and other activities. “As I sat in the job interview, I felt no pressure to get it right,” she says. The night before Young Women camp, Yee was up until 2 a.m. finishing a presentation that was part of the application. Upon her return from camp, Yee received an offer to manage the Church’s interactive and animation team.
Am I supposed to consider this? Yee wondered. “After praying, the thought came, This doesn’t have to be the be-all, end-all, Kristin. But you should give it a try,” she recalls. “I found myself saying again, ‘I’ll give it a try.’”
In her role, Yee oversaw animation, motion graphics, AR/VR, and exhibit design, until her position changed into directing and producing special projects. “It’s been challenging at times, but whenever I doubt things, I remember the Lord is in it, and He’ll help me through since He led me here,” she says.
Bryan Lefler, an animation director who has worked with Yee both at Disney and at the Church, says Yee moves with a sense of calm and grace, even amid the most difficult situations. “We worked closely for a very long time, which means I have all the dirt on her,” he says. “Guess what? There’s no dirt.”
Beyond conversations of work, life challenges, and which imported chocolate is best, “we’ve had many conversations about depression, anxiety, loneliness, faith, and the future,” Lefler says. “We’ve supported each other, shed some tears, and laughed. The characteristics that stand foremost in my mind are that she cares deeply and, above all, loves Christ.”
A Fine Art
Yee had been serving on the Primary general advisory council when she was called to serve as second counselor in the Relief Society general presidency. In the days leading up to the announcement at April 2022 general conference, “I watched the world differently, and I looked at people differently,” she recalls.
As Yee has traveled, taught, and ministered, she’s developed an eye for noticing how God shows His love to the one. “Wherever we go, He shows up every time and blesses as He intends to bless,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t think it matters as much what we say; He’s going to bless them because they’ve come in faith. I just marvel in gratitude and praise as I watch Him love His children in such personal ways.”
On a day-to-day basis, Yee is involved in “a lot of different councils on a lot of different topics regarding a lot of different needs,” she says. “The sisters are very involved. There isn’t a dull moment.”
All the while, understanding the Lord’s priorities remains paramount. “We’re always trying to be mindful of what He wants because we could put our time and energy into so many places,” she says. “You’ll watch certain topics or needs rise, and you’ll watch others recede based on His will.” Ultimately, she says, “His timing is His; His work is His. And His way blesses His children the most.”
Yee has come to know this principle well—in her art, her career, her church service, and her family—as she’s been the canvas and the paintbrush in the process of creation. “You have to learn to trust, and you trust, and you trust, and you continue to trust because there’s still more we can trust to Him,” she says. “As much as it’s a struggle and a toil, you never regret trusting Him. You look back and you praise Him for His unfailing love and for letting you choose Him, and you come to know and love Him in ways you never would otherwise.”
As Yee has put her covenant relationship with the Lord first, “He’s helped heal and bless my family in ways I would have never imagined,” she says. “I’ve learned that our careers, callings, and education are meant to bless and develop our covenant relationship with God, our families, and each other. Worshipping in the house of the Lord has given me perspective, strength, a feeling of belonging, love, and power to do all that He asks me to do and become.”
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Written by Emily Edmonds
Photography by Bradley Slade
