My passion for pursuing visual art started when I was 5 years old, leaving my family as they moved through the Philadelphia Museum of Art so that I could go back and gaze longer at Prometheus Bound by Peter Paul Rubens. 

My doctoral work at the Duke University Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies focused on Contemporary Photography, Film, and Critical Theory. I became interested in the phenomenology of artistic production and consumption — how the artist’s and audience’s bodies connect through the artwork. My doctoral thesis asked whether there were any common visual experiences uniting Americans, and it offered the first academic history of school portraiture — individual bust portraits of school children that became ritualized during the 20th century. 

After teaching for several years as an adjunct faculty member at Elon University, I decided to put my education into practice and pursue photography professionally. At present, I am house photographer for the Durham Performing Arts Center and work with corporate and individual clients to create images which support pragmatic needs in an aesthetic fashion.