I am a painter, art educator and critical writer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. I teach at the Children’s Museum of the Arts, where I am currently an artist-in-residence. I write for Beautiful Bizarre Magazine and Quantumartreview. My painting is represented by Gallery Henoch.

My paintings are a collage of cultural and personal history and symbolism. I am currently creating a series of female icons in a project called Women, started in 2016 as a form of resistance to misogyny and racism. This series features referential and memory- based figures in imagined locations and costumes. The paintings allude to Primitive Flemish, Italian Renaissance, Spanish Baroque, and English painters. I study patterning from specific biology, including amphibians, cephalopods, and tropical botany and incorporate a multitude of natural design and imagined patterning into the material world of each image. One work generally takes several months to complete, because I work indirectly in glaze passages like the Flemish originators of oil paint. 100 Women owes a great debt to Francisco de Zurbaran’s paintings of Catholic female saints. I want the series to represent a vision of Utopia, of celebrated cultural pluralism and empowerment. As each new work progresses, I am presented with exciting technical and material challenges as well as opportune windows to research works of inspiration in art history and important historical and contemporary female role models.

My prior body of work, entitled Intricacies, lasted from 2010 to 2016. In it I painted large scale artifacts as a surrealist lattice on which grew imagined and memory-based patterning. My painting Chandelier (2012) is rooted in the structure of a candelabra that is also a crown to an upside-down monochromatic self- portrait. From its metallic branches hang Indonesian puppets, bird nests, fruit, carvings, faceted jewels, and a portrait of my mother. In the painting Venus and Time (2013), a miniature 15th century Flemish Madonna, whose head sprouts a burning candle, sits on top of a Victorian clock. The clock’s central wooden chest contains a Janus self-portrait beside the Neolithic birthing Goddess of Çatalhöyük. In the series I attempted to juxtapose personal narrative and global art history and create compelling visual metaphors.