Kalina spent 10 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications, starting as a research programmer and eventually becoming the Director of the Advanced Visualization Lab and Founding Director of the Visualization Program Office. In her earlier technical roles, she wrote software that processes and visualizes various types of massive scientific data obtained at supercomputer centers. She was the primary developer of 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), "Birth of Planet Earth" (fulldome), and "Seeing the Beginning of Time" (4K).