Visual Biography

I was born in 1979 in St. Louis, MO, and shortly after we moved to the suburbs of Chicago, where I have lived ever since.  When I was 10, my parents divorced and I moved with my dad to Geneva.  As a child, I was greatly influenced by my family life and my visual culture, including cartoons, fairy tales, music videos and comic books.  People were my subject of choice, and I began my lifelong love of expressing my identity through narratives about myself and others inspired by love, universality and a keen interest in psychological anthropology.

 Love is a large part of my philosophy as an artist, educator and a human being.

Who I love, and what I love has always informed the basis of what I create into an art form.

As I grew older, I started to create art surrounding my identity, still inspired by visual culture, but I quickly became influenced by social justice issues, particularly feminism, and how the world views women in general.  I began to learn about more formal art genres such as surrealism, and had a fascination with dreams and psychology as I studied about Salvador Dali, Artists such as Kathe Kollwitz, Annie Leibovitz and Cindy Sherman further influenced my explorations with identity and feminism well into my college years at Columbia College Chicago, where I studied art and photography.

Man, c. 2003

Vain, c. 2003

 After college, I fell into shooting weddings and fell in love.  Weddings combined my interests in love, identity, narrative and psychological anthropology as well as photography and art making, creating an outlet for me creatively as well as a way to make a living doing what I love to do. As I told the stories of others, I connected it to my own identity, especially after getting married myself and the fact that I was a female entrepreneur, which provided me with a sense of pride and another outlet to express my feminist sensibility. I came to realize the importance of universality, community, connecting with others and the power of art to do that.

Untitled Wedding Photos, c. 2016

Dream 1, Folklore Series, 2018

After 12 years, I started to feel comfortable with where I was.  The death of David Bowie, combined with my new and life changing experiences of motherhood, I started to realize that I want to offer more through my life, art and career than what I have so far.  Since applying for and beginning NIU, I have made more art inspired by my own ideas and concepts than I have in the years since my undergraduate college days.  I have not only take a risk with my career, I have tried pushing my art beyond photography, drawing upon my roots as an artist, but creating work that has more meaning and power.  One of my weaknesses in the past is that I have always turned inward and been afraid to share my art with others and I have often felt stuck with using myself as a subject.  That is something I have been trying to go beyond lately, in order to make my messages even more connected universally.

The four video clips above combine big ideas that are the basis for my educational philosophy.  My artistic philosophy is similar, combining the big ideas of love, identity expressed through explorations with feminism and emotional/psychological illness, psychological anthropology, and universality.