about me
Otis Graduate Studios, 2019
If anything, the past two years have taught me that staying present is the best way to be effective and enjoy yourself doing it.
I’m a Los Angeles-based artist and a Senior Content Creator at ShootProof. I’m also a Master of Fine Arts candidate at Otis College of Art and Design with an emphasis in photography. Every day is a chaotic mishmash of making: art, photography, marketing videos, scripts, educational content, animations, personal essays. And I love it. I love being a storyteller.
When I’m not creating for work or my practice, I’m hiking with my two adorable pit bulls, reading nonfiction, pursuing my undying love of street photography, plotting my next adventure, nurturing my plants, watching documentaries, and eating my way through East LA.
I hope my adventures inspire you to be fearless and explore our big world.
my current projects
My work interrogates the convoluted treatment of mental health in the United States, the psychological effects of substance abuse in relation to mental illness, and the link between emotions and color theory. It’s an endless undertaking of questioning medical standards, examining individual experiences, researching drug studies, and playing with colors.
My latest exploration arises from my fascination with the survival of the human race: our origins, our dehumanization of the other, our preoccupation with individualization; and our future as a capitalist, privatized, globalized, industrialized, information-gorging society. Today, millions of Americans are heavily dependent on drugs, whether that be prescriptions or illegal substances. And, in this way, we are more in our own heads than ever before. I am trying to understand the implications of this and complicate them in pursuit of answers.
my past experiences
I’ve told stories through many different outlets: creative direction, photography, videography and video editing, web design, non-profit grassroots community outreach and organization, broadcast journalism, documentary filmmaking & marketing, animating, graphic art, logo design, and hyperlocal journalism.
I graduated from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2013 with a concentration in broadcast journalism, photography, and social justice. Throughout college I freelanced as a video journalist for The New York Times Local East Village. After I graduated, I worked as the Grassroots Community Manager at Girl Rising, pursuing my passion for multimedia activism.
In 2014, I left New York. I bought a one-way ticket to a foreign country, and decided to just see where life would take me. I started my journey in Fiji, built a new life in Australia, and backpacked Southeast Asia. And what I learned from my travels is that the beauty and self-understanding triggered by this kind of nomad-like existence is worth the challenges of uncertainty.
Taken in Cat Ba, Vietnam, April 2015
During my travels I interviewed a Cambodian mafia leader, wrote food reviews on fried tarantulas and preserved duck fetuses, documented my own motorbike crash, photographed a traditional H’mong village wedding, recorded my detainment in Laos and investigated corruption in the Laotian police system, and narrated a three-day trek up to the remote Kalinga region of The Philippines, where I met the last of a dying lineage of headhunting tattoo artists.
In 2015 I moved to Atlanta and joined ShootProof’s team. I became a contributing writer and photographer for The Ma’Ati, a hybrid travel webzine and fictional narrative that functions as a nomad’s guide to the universe, as well as a blogger for BeFunky, an online photo-editing software company.
In my spare time, I traveled and documented. I began an investigation of the oft-overlooked flyoverlands that occupy the airspace between New York and Los Angeles. My goal was to explore these many American landscapes, starting with my hometown and moving from oceans to plains to mountains to deserts, and tell narratives of a thrifty, spontaneous road tripper looking for the out-of-the-ordinary in American life. (Learn more about Flyoverlands.)
In 2016 I relocated to Los Angeles to cultivate my budding passion in the arts and experience the weird, wild, and sprawling communities of this diverse city. And I haven’t been disappointed; every neighborhood in LA is a distinct microcosm with its own culture, landscape, and perspective. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get enough of it.