I'm an artist, organizer, and arts educator based in Connecticut, where I create and collaborate, mostly on projects centering the natural world.
I’ve been drawing, painting, and building things for as long as I can remember. My art is about the mind bending range of creatures and energy in the world, and depicting animals, people, and places with a mix of looseness and tightness, and plenty of color.
The natural world offers some of life’s starkest contrasts and greatest wonders. My paintings look at the individuality and complexity of living things and how they exist in an unpredictable and chaotic world. My process echoes nature, bringing together specific and detailed description with chaotic and spontaneous elements. In this way I attempt to approach the beauty and strangeness of our ever changing world.
I earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, studying in Rome for a year. From there I moved to St. John in the US Virgin Islands, where I made and sold art, and opened a small gallery with another artist. After a year I moved to NYC, worked in a mural house, earned an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, and with friends opened and ran a cooperative gallery on East Seventh street in the basement of a Ukrainian church.
Drawn by a live work opportunity, I moved to Connecticut. There I joined and for a year led the Loft Artists Association, developing my art and helping to create and deliver free art workshops and experiences to the public, and became a teaching artist with the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield. I created art classes and exhibits for middle schoolers in Norwalk through the Silvermine Guild of Artists’ outreach program, and ran a free choice art program for local middle schoolers in Stamford’s public charter school. I created and exhibited work in Connecticut and New York, including at the Stamford Museum and Nature Center and the Lockwood Mathews Museum in Norwalk, had work added to private and public art collections, including at Stamford Hospital, SH’s Bennet Cancer Center, Yale New Haven Hospital’s Park Avenue Medical Center, and Sacred Heart University, and included in the movies “The Bounty Hunter” with Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston and “Something Borrowed” with Kate Hudson and Ginnifer Goodwin.
As New Canaan Library’s second artist in residence I exhibited and offered nature and conservation themed art workshops to the public, and through the National Parks Artist in Residence program spent a month living and painting at Weir Farm in Wilton in 2019, returning to lead nature based art workshops. Through Weir Farm, The Department of the Interior Museum acquired my painting "Tree Looking Towards Burlingham House" for their collection, where it will be included in an upcoming exhibit showcasing the National Parks Artists in Residence program.
In August 2020 I installed a 110 foot mural at the Bennett Cancer Center in Stamford. Together with the upheaval of the pandemic, witnessing the impact this unexpected public art had on visitors changed everything for me. I put together a public art education and creation program, and together with two former students of mine, designed and installed a mural on the west side of our city. I partnered with statewide non-profit RiseUp for Arts to found Stamford Murals, a public art and youth mentoring non profit. Since then, the two youth artists and I have installed 5 public murals in our city and organized free mural arts festivals for the public.
To see work in progress & more, follow me on instagram!
