My life was forever shaped at the age of seven: the day my grandfather taught me how to draw. 

This moment would became the catalyst for a lifelong pursuit of identity through creativity. My adolescent years, defined with a pencil in hand, preceded a decade of digital exploration in graphic design and photography. The year of my Saturn Return was one of realignment, and once again, I began dreaming myself back into the world of traditional art making.

With the yearning to incorporate art more deeply into life, I co-founded an online publication that cultivated dialogues with artists and artisans about their work and processes with Louisville artist, Megan Bickel. This passion project reignited my desire for the sensory experience only available when making by hand.

Wrestling with selecting a single medium (a leftover belief from childhood that we can only be “one thing”), I began to unlearn and relearn. After countless inspiring classes with my most influential mentor, Barb Smucker, paired with transformational messaging gained from Louise Fletcher’s online courses, my recurring resistance to material limitations was rectified when these two humans [re]introduced me to mixed media art and collage. 

This was my “aha!” moment—
yet in actuality, it was a multi-year long season and series of discoveries.