About a decade ago, her longstanding hobby of photography spawned an interest in digital imaging and creating photos for the web. Frustration with the existing Windows tools, combined with a switch to Linux as her primary platform, led to fiddling with the basics of GIMP. After a long period of resistance she was finally persuaded to go beyond basic photo cropping and resizing and try "that layer thing," and the rest is history.

Akkana is a long-time member of the GIMP community and an occasional contributor to GIMP's source code. She enjoys hiking, mountain biking, and astronomy, giving talks about all sorts of topics (especially GIMP), and filling up her hard drive with digital images that she can never bring herself to delete, mostly of scenes from local hiking trails and from travels in the desert southwest. She lives in San Jose, California, with her husband and a motley assortment of old computers.