about me
Hello All!
Thank you for visiting my site, I am honored to share my life's work with you!
I am a professional artist originally from Chicago, Illinois, and have now lived in Los Angeles, California for the past 10 years. Art and Film have always been passions of mine. As a kid, you could always find me working on some kind of art project. My mom, also a professional artist, would take me to museums on weekends to sketch, and I was fortunate that both of my parents really encouraged my love for art and film. My passion for painting portraits really developed in high school, and I ended up getting my first art education job when I was 17 at a local art studio in our town, teaching portraits in oil painting. Throughout my childhood, I had also been filming and editing my own movies on a self-rigged editing system involving a dual VHS player, probably too many RCA cables, a microphone, and a cd/cassette player. I knew that I wanted to learn more about the process of filmmaking.
I majored in cinematography and minored in fine art at Southern Illinois University. After leaving college I jumped on my first film set as an Art PA and then spent the next seven years working on movies, commercials, music videos, and television shows both nationally and internationally in the art department with my focus on Art Direction.
I then spent ten years working at two of Los Angeles’ elite private schools where I worked as an Art Educator, teaching roughly 500 students a week across seven grade levels, painted theater set backdrops, AND met the love of my life. But even during my years working in education, I still worked on small projects in film including a commission I took to paint one of my favorite actors, Steve Buscemi for the television series, Miracle Workers on TBS.
Now, I am still painting, making movies, and teaching, but all from home so I can take care of my two-year-old daughter Ava. My passions besides art are traveling, being in nature (especially at the beach and on the mountains), reading fiction of all genres, and exploring the culinary delicacies the world has to offer.
You can follow me on social at the following links below.