I was born in New York City, which has influenced my interest in documenting the world around me. Growing up in New York in the 1980s, I was exposed at a young age to glimpses of the social ills affecting our city, despite coming from a lovely middle class home. At the time, one couldn’t escape seeing these visions of addiction and poverty around the city, even in the nicer neighborhoods. Crack cocaine had descended upon the city like a plague, and the resulting crime and desperation could no longer simply be contained in the ghettos of the city, out-of-view of the middle classes and the elite. The fragments of exposure I had to these issues as a child growing up in the city contributed greatly to my current drive to understand and help others understand these issues.
I just finished graduate school at Ohio University, and while I have had success with my first major published project, I am still very much a novice to the industry in many ways, and want to learn to become a more inventive storyteller, and to push my own boundaries as a visual storyteller and artist.