Okki was born and grew up in Jakarta. In the Jakarta Field Station, he was involved in the Language Acquisition project. He is now currently working on the Traditional Betawi Malay project.

He completed his first degree at the Christian University of Indonesia and his MA in Linguistics at Eastern Michigan University. He also joined the LINGUIST List troop as a student editor from 2007-2009, involved in the Multi Tree and LL-MAP projects.

Besides language documentation, he enjoys theoretical phonology, optimality theory, and diachronic analysis. The phenomenon of word order within syntax and psycholinguistics interface also amazes him.