I am from a small town in southern Virginia. A rural, company town… furniture and textiles. Unfortunately, today dying a slow globalization death. Growing up in a small town you spend most of your time daydreaming the escape, expecting life outside to be more. You feel so few freedoms when you grow up with so many eyes on you. Expectations to fill and roles to play. Upon leaving, you often crave the simplicity and innocence you experienced while living there. In some ways, it was quite idyllic yet constraining, a duality I have lived all my life. Creating a constant desire to escape and experience more.

Attending Virginia Tech, I eventually decided to study film, theater and English, expanding my worldview and whetting my appetite for the arts. Drawn to the film business, I moved to Baltimore, MD in 1995, where one of my first jobs was on the highly acclaimed television drama, Homicide: Life on the Street. I started working on feature films soon after and I thrived in the ability to show new and different realities, to make the audience question everything. Creating experience if only felt in that screen-lit room of humanity. It was a natural fit coming from a childhood of searching and dreams. Three years later, I moved to Los Angeles to continue my film career, and in 2001, after too much business and not enough art, my reality shifted. Photography had taken over my creative life. I left the business, realizing my world was more suited for one frame at a time.

I am self-taught. I have watched and felt images all my life. I am of the “TV baby” generation, and though I played in the creeks and woods as a child, my vision is born from the confluence of these childhood memories with the architecture, art, cinema, design and music that I surround myself with as an adult. Some days I miss that small town, the simplicity, and I still struggle with where I belong. My work is about that search.