I received my MFA in Painting from Penn State in 2003, but have been making art for much longer – since I discovered it to be the most accurate and decisive way to describe and communicate the inexplicable.

I was born in South Dakota to parents of different generations and cultural backgrounds. With my father, an Army cartoonist and – eventually - an architect born in depression-era South Dakota, and my mother, a nomad-hearted musician from New Zealand, I moved often and attended many schools in several states before my senior year of high school.

Eventually, with an MFA from Penn State, I found work in retail display design and now work in that field, while maintaining my art practice in a live/work art community. Throughout my art career, I’ve worked primarily in gouache and oil paint, fascinated by the idea that beauty can only be fully experienced through the high relief of adjacency to its opposite - as in life, complex, intimate and inextricable.