In the winter of 1999, I spent three months in postwar Kosova doing relief work with the widows of Gjakova. These women had lost their husbands and children to waves of war and systematic genocide. It was during this intensely difficult and beautiful time that I felt my passion for art ignite. Back in the USA, I pursued my painting and drawing education at Biola University in Los Angeles, and later completed my M.F.A. at University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Over the years of study, I have cultivated a visual language and artistic process to articulate my experience in Kosova. My mark-making and materials have a raw quality. My process continues to be inspired and led by my relationship with Jesus Christ. Out of this spiritual dialogue flows work that is an agent for healing, recovery and breakthrough. By engaging with and relaying stories of personal and collective trauma, I wish to be an artist who carries truth with an intensity that melts through mere convention. When one has experienced situations where life and death are clearly defined there is little room or time for anything else.

“All great works of art find their full force in those moments when conventions of the world are stripped away and confront our weakness, vulnerability, and mortality. For learning, in the end, meant little to writers like Shakespeare unless it translated into human experience.”

– Chris Hedges