About me
I grew up running the dirt-packed streets of a trailer court community outside of Riverton, Wyoming. My elementary and high school Art teachers were the people who made a pivotal difference in my life. Art made space for a type of freedom I didn’t feel in other environments.
Since then, I’ve always loved showing people of all ages how to build things, be creative, and express themselves in visual art forms. My path into K-12 Art Education has been a meandering one shaped by many art and life experiences. After earning my MFA, I worked for a couple of years as a coordinator for an early childhood project and freelanced as a photographer and graphic designer. I wanted to get back into teaching, so for 3 years I lived in Laramie, Wyoming and drove around northern Colorado to teach 3D Design and Sculpture I and II classes. Throughout these same years I was an active part of a community art collective and city mural project. Our collective opened our studio space and taught people how to make wearable sculpture, signs and banners, and printmaking. Through the mural project I painted my own murals as well as worked on collaborative projects.
In 2019, I was a guest teacher for a summer course for 6th - 8th grade students at Arapahoe Middle School in Arapahoe, Wyoming and this pulled me directly into teaching in a public school K-12 setting. It made me think a lot about how the experiences we have with art in earlier years have a huge impact on whether we continue to make art throughout our lives and certainly on whether we enroll in art classes in college. I decided I wanted to teach K-12 because I want to be part of affirming art’s potential for freedom, self-expression and critical thinking for people earlier on in their lives.
