Kalina is a computer science PhD student at the University of Utah, researching computer graphics and data visualization. She is also a Director on the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee.

Until 2024, Kalina was the Director of the Advanced Visualization Lab and the Founding Director of the Visualization Program Office at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Prior to her leadership role, she was a research programmer who developed software that processes and visualizes various types of massive scientific data obtained at supercomputer centers, such as Blue Waters. Her favorite project makes scientific visualization tools freely available to artists and scientists, through Ytini- an open-source middleware between the scientific analysis and visualization Python package, yt, and the visual effects software, Houdini. Kalina contributed to the creation of such films as "A Beautiful Planet" (IMAX), "Solar Superstorms" (fulldome), and "Seeing the Beginning of Time" (4K). She recently gave a talk at TEDxUIUC, a local chapter of the TED conference, describing her path as a woman engineer.

Kalina also spent time working at The New York Times, Autodesk Research, and Apple.

Aside from working on films and computer graphics research, Kalina also professionally develops Android apps and websites. She is also an amateur Beatles historian, makeup artist, musician, and UI/UX designer.