Artist. Creative explorer. Relentlessly curious human.
I've made art with sunlight and seawater, photographed places at the edges of the world, written poems, and suspended entire worlds from ceilings. I've also spent a considerable amount of time sitting very still, doing absolutely nothing.
All of which, it turns out, is connected.
I'm fascinated by what happens when we really pay attention: to the natural world, to each other, to beauty, to injustice, and to all the gloriously messy business of being human.
That fascination runs through my art, my writing, my mindfulness practice, and the way I try to move through the world.
Making things. Asking questions.
I've never been particularly good at sticking to one medium. Poetry was my first creative love, and I have a bachelor’s in English with a creative writing focus to show for it. But I’m insatiable when it comes to learning new things. I got a master’s in publishing. I eventually fell hard for photography. I've also experimented with printmaking, encaustics, book arts, collage, and just about anything else that catches my imagination.
These days, much of my work involves cyanotypes, alternative photographic processes, and installations that explore our relationship with the natural world, impermanence, memory, and the things we might otherwise overlook.
Sometimes I work with materials gathered from a particular place, letting a location’s plants, water, weather, and sunlight become part of the work itself. Sometimes I return to a subject again and again, watching it change or disappear. And sometimes a question demands something entirely different.
I follow the questions that won't leave me alone, making art in whatever form they demand.
The unlikely business of sitting still
Almost twenty years ago, I traveled to Tassajara Zen Center in California for a writing workshop with a side helping of meditation. Getting there involved a dusty, treacherous mountain road in a giant Suburban driven by a Buddhist monk. At the end of that road, in a valley that smelled of wildfire, lavender, and freshly baked bread, I discovered something that would change the direction of my life. Meditation. Which is a funny thing to fall in love with when you're someone who wants to do approximately 47 things at once.
That first encounter grew into years of meditation and Buddhist study, eventually leading to my lay ordination as a Buddhist minister, or acharya, under Venerables Pannavati and Pannadipa at Heartwood Refuge. I also became a certified Workplace Mindfulness Facilitator, bringing contemplative practices into secular settings.
Mindfulness, for me, has never been about becoming perpetually serene or floating above the messiness of being human. Quite the opposite. It's about being here for all of it.
And then there's joy.
I believe there's a kind of joy that doesn't depend on everything going well. Something deeper than happiness, more durable than a good mood. A joy that can exist right alongside grief, anger, fear, and heartbreak without diminishing any of them.
I won't pretend I've mastered living from that place. Not even close. But I've glimpsed it enough to believe it's possible. And that possibility has changed how I experience the world.
Art and mindfulness are two of the ways I explore it. Both ask me to pay attention. Both bring me into closer relationship with the world as it actually is, rather than the world I wish it would be. And both keep reminding me that being alive is an astonishing thing.
Beyond the studio
I've spent two decades as a civil servant in federal communications, a career filled with opportunities to create through writing, graphic design, podcast production, videography, photography, website design and maintenance, and more. I've also volunteered as an interpretive ranger living and working inside a volcano, led creative experiences, and spent a fair amount of my life wandering around with a camera, looking at things.
I'm drawn to wild places, interesting people, unexpected connections, and projects that probably seemed much more reasonable before I started them.
I split my time between Washington, DC, and Williamsburg, Virginia, where I live with my husband, Michael, and a lot of houseplants I’m trying not to kill. And maybe I should count Amtrak as a third home.
I'm still learning, experimenting, asking questions, making things, and occasionally getting in way over my head. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Inclusion + Belonging
Wings Open Studio is a space of radical welcome.
All identities, all bodies, all ways of being—you belong here.
We are deeply committed to cultivating a community rooted in compassion, respect, and creative freedom. That means honoring difference, celebrating expression, and making room for the full range of human experience—grief, joy, rage, wonder, and everything in between.
We stand firmly against racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, fatphobia, and all forms of exclusion or harm.
We believe in accessibility, dignity, and creative space for all.
You do not need to be calm, enlightened, healed, or good at art.
You only need to be human. And curious. And willing to begin.
Want to connect?
Have a question, a thought, or something you just want to share? I'd love to hear from you.
