Designing a New Game Plan — Alumni Profile, Zully Barrientos ’11

Every chapter of Zully Barrientos ’11’s life seems to start with a leap of faith. First, leaving sunny Southern California for a tiny liberal arts college in western Massachusetts. Next, moving to Spain after graduation. Then, quitting a steady government consulting job in Washington, D.C., to teach herself coding abroad in Costa Rica.

Now a producer at Riot Games, Barrientos has built a career that connects all the things she’s always loved — art, technology, and storytelling. It’s not the path she expected when she first arrived at Amherst, but looking back, she can trace every twist and turn to her confidence in the idea that you should pursue your passion, even if you don’t know exactly where it’s going to take you.

Before Amherst 

For Barrientos, the decision to attend Amherst College was, in her words, “a total leap of faith.” Growing up in Southern California, she had always assumed she’d stay close to home for college. “The expectation was that I’d go to a [University of California system school], [the University of Southern California], or some state school nearby,” she said.

Before coming to Amherst, she had never heard of liberal arts colleges, let alone one tucked away in a small town in western Massachusetts. “My best friend was flipping through a ‘Princeton Review’ book and found this random little school that seemed like it’d be up my alley,” she recalled. “I loved its focus on the humanities and small classes, and the idea that I’d get to learn from professors who could teach anywhere but chose to be accessible.”

When she stepped onto Amherst’s campus for the first time, the contrast with the West Coast hit her almost immediately — the pace, the weather, even the way people talked. “Honestly, my biggest culture shock wasn’t moving abroad later in life — it was moving from SoCal to New England,” she said. “But that was part of the experience. I loved it.” 

Connecting Different Interests

At Amherst, Barrientos dove into the unfamiliar. She double-majored in political science and art history, which were two subjects she was always passionate about. “I took art all through middle school and high school, so that’s always been a thing for me,” she said. “Then, I was really interested in world history and English, so that kind of was a throughline to political science, which is what I ended up pursuing at Amherst.” 

Although her interests were in two distinct major departments, Barrientos found a way to balance the two pursuits in her academic career. “For me, art was how I explored politics. My work often focused on the relationship between the United States and Latin America, history, and power,” she said. 

Her involvement in these two contrasting areas allowed Barrientos to explore history in a unique way. “Art lets you talk about power in a different way,” she said. “It’s a language that doesn’t rely on policy papers — it reaches people through feeling.”

Finding Her People

Barrientos’ years at Amherst were marked by a willingness to experiment. She joined Dance and Step at Amherst College (DASAC), tutored in Springfield through La Causa, and even joined the equestrian team. “You just have so much access to creative opportunities in college,” she said. “After you graduate, it’s harder to find that kind of time and community.”

Much of that community came from Williston Hall, her freshman dorm, where nightly dinners with close friends became a ritual. “That group became my foundation,” she said. “From the beginning, we would have these massive dorm nights that we liked to self-organize to watch movies together. We would coordinate lunch and dinner together, so we’d always eat dinner with 15 people. One of my closest friends from that dorm is still part of every major milestone in my life.”

Barrientos also added that one of the things that most stood out to her about Amherst was her close relationships with professors. “I loved that we could take our professors out to dinner,” she said. “I still talk about that with my friends, because people who didn’t go to schools like Amherst can’t even imagine it. They’ll say, ‘What do you mean you can just take your professor to dinner? Mine wouldn’t even know my name.’” 

That sense of connection extended beyond the classroom. She recalled how one of her art history professors would host her seminar students at her home, cooking an elaborate meal for them at the end of the semester. “It felt really special,” Barrientos said. “You could tell they cared about us as people, not just as students.”

Questioning the Future

After graduation, Amherst helped Barrientos land a yearlong position in Spain with the Ministry of Education through a program for recent graduates. While Barrientos was teaching American culture to K–12 students through this job, the experience also gave her space to reflect on her next step. “I always assumed I’d go to grad[uate] school,” she said. “But I didn’t know if it’d be art or policy.” 

Ultimately, she chose to study international relations and Pacific studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she leaned into public policy, research, and even quantitative modeling. “It was a very numbers-heavy program — lots of calculus, modeling, and data analysis,” she said. “For a humanities person, that was terrifying at first. But I loved the challenge.”

A Change of Pace from Washington

Her graduate studies would become the foundation for an unexpected career turn. After graduate school, Barrientos worked in Washington, D.C. as a government consultant. “I worked for a federal consulting company, the office right next to the White House. So it was really cool. I did projects with the district attorney while I was there, and that was more business process, organizational management, and chain management type work,” she said. “It was interesting work, but I realized the slow pace of the government wasn’t fulfilling enough. I missed being creative.”

So, in 2017, Barrientos made a bold move: She quit her job, moved to Costa Rica, and began re-training for a career in technology. Becoming more involved in web design at her job in D.C. made her realize that technology was her new direction in life. “I think most of the media that’s being consumed is digital these days…So I dove into learning front coding,” she said.

Learning the Code

Eventually, her decision to learn coding paid off. After a brief time in Costa Rica, Barrientos returned to the U.S. and took her first step into the gaming world with an apprenticeship with Microsoft’s Xbox team. “It was surreal,” she said. “To go from government consulting to working on video games was such a huge shift. Suddenly, I was surrounded by artists, writers, and engineers — all collaborating to build these enormous worlds.”

At Microsoft, she found that her role on the production team was her ideal position. “Production is about communication,” she explained. “You’re making sure everyone’s aligned and empowered to do their best work. It’s about translating between disciplines and finding creative solutions.”

From “Halo” to Riot

From there, she joined the video game development company 343 Industries and worked on “Halo Infinite,” one of the biggest franchises in gaming. “I grew up in that studio, from an associate producer to more of a mid-level producer. Then I found roles from there in terms of the work of a producer,” she said. “I always tell people who are kind of interested in this position [producer], you kind of have to be willing and excited about flexing into what is required to support the team in the project.”

After years in larger studios, she moved to a smaller indie company, Mountaintop Studios, to help build a production team from the ground up. “It was an amazing challenge,” she said. Your hand is in all kinds of buckets, and to understand how an organization works, and have a say in how that works and the changes that are needed, that’s all exciting to me.”

After working at Mountaintop Studios producer for a few years, Barrientos was offered a job at Riot Games, a leading video game developing company who have created popular games, such as “League of Legends” and “Valorant.” At Riot, Barrientos helps bridge art, engineering, and design, bringing both her creative and organizational expertise to life.

Where it All Started

Looking back, Barrientos credits Amherst with teaching her the skills that matter most: communication, critical thinking, and confidence. “At first, I worried that my path looked scattered,” she said. “But I’ve realized that everything I’ve done has been about connecting ideas and people. Whether you’re making art or managing a team, it’s about communication and impact.”

She credits Amherst for teaching her how to believe in yourself and go after your interests. “Amherst taught me how to learn,” she said. “It made me confident in my ability to figure things out, even when I had no idea what I was doing. Specifically at Amherst, there was never a time where I wrote a paper where a professor didn’t push me on my argument and my logic and my thinking. That really pushed me into this place of like, ‘Okay, I can’t fake this, I really have to be able to back up my thinking.’”

Building Worlds and Lifting Weights

Outside of work, Barrientos competes in Olympic-style weightlifting, finding balance between mental and physical discipline. “I’m a huge weight lifter. I’ve been doing that for years now. I compete locally and sometimes nationally. So, that’s a huge part of my life,” she said. “I think it’s really nice, because I’ve always liked this balance between really brain-heavy, cerebral stuff — which is more my job —  and getting into your body and doing other physical things. That’s why I’ve always loved art and polystyrene — like doing stuff with your hands, and then being very in your head.”

Even though weightlifting is a huge part of her life now, Barrientos never expected to find herself in that world. “I grew up playing soccer through the beginning of college, and then I had an injury, so I couldn’t do that anymore,” she said. “ I had to have surgery, which was when I found strength training through my recovery. So I started kind of doing that, and then I found specifically Olympic weightlifting through CrossFit, and I really gravitated to that. So then I just transitioned fully from there.”

Future Plans

Recently, Barrientos has grown interested in mentoring Amherst students going into the tech industry, including encouraging non-STEM majors to explore the industry. “I think that there [are] a lot of people, [especially] students at Amherst, who may self-select out of certain careers because they’re more humanities focused and not necessarily [focused] on [the] hard science, engineering, STEM kind of stuff,” she said. “But I would say that there’s so much space for people who have all these really great, critical thinking soft skills that come out of liberal arts colleges like Amherst that are needed in these fields.”

Looking back on her academic and career journey, Barrientos would advise Amherst students to lean into their varied interests and place less emphasis on pursuing a specific path. “I would encourage folks to just open their horizons on what they can do,” she said. “I would say that the important thing is just to start. It doesn’t matter where you start, it’s where you end up and it’s where you want to end up. Each experience will take you somewhere and teach you something that will get you closer to that thing.”