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About Me

Born and raised in Chicago, I have chosen to keep this magnificent city as my home. During college I took a year off to live in Ashland, Oregon with some friends. Having traveled out west on a few occasions previously, I had developed an intense urge to be surrounded by mountains and nature. Growing up in the city didn’t really provide me with the feeling I had in Oregon when I could open my door to beauty. At the time I believed that Illinois was flat and full of corn and I needed to be out west to fully appreciate nature.

My main intention was to change what I knew, to experience something different than what I had grown up with and had “seen” and I wanted to photograph and document my journey. And it all to culminated into a hitchhiking adventure along the coast, through Oregon and into California, with a good friend of mine.

After my great adventure, I knew it was time to go back to school and I knew I wanted to study photography. I knew that I didn’t want to have be paying student loans for the rest of my life, and I could do that by attending an Illinois University.

I heard about Southern Illinois University from some friends. One thing was that it was a party school, the next was that not a lot of people graduated from there, but the last thing I heard is that it was nothing like the Illinois I knew. There were cliffs and peaks, and rivers and waterfalls. It is the home of the Shawnee National Forest.

I knew it was for me, and I knew I was going to show a lot of people that I could party and study and actually graduate. Which I did in 2005. After discovering that SIU had a sister school in Nakajo, Japan, I made sure that I would go. I spent the first of my last two semesters at SIU-N in Japan. And I would have stayed an extra semester if I didn’t have to return to graduate. I had an amazing time in Japan and acquired some of what I feel to be my best photographic work to date. I was awestruck by the beauty of the land and the culture.

I moved back to Chicago after graduating from SIU with a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication and Media Arts with a specialization in Photography. After venturing out into the world I discovered a new beauty for what I grew up in. I discovered that Illinois is not just some flat corn riddled state. There is beauty in the ‘flat’, and nature, even in the city.

My bio comes off making me look like a nature photographer, but really it is just through nature that I discovered my love and passion for photography. I love the fact that I get to capture a moment in time and to look back on it later to spark a memory, like a historical record of what once was. I want to create a piece of art that draws you in and encourages you to develop a feeling or an emotion.