Born 1986 St. Paul, Minnesota, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

BFA - Maryland Institute College of Art, 2009

MFA - Brooklyn College, 2011

I love playing the role of the storyteller. My paintings weave narratives, tear them apart, and string them back together again to create new fantasies and allegories. The stories in my paintings are inspired by eclectic sources: from Japanese animation to medieval history, from traditional fairy tales to everyday life. The characters in my paintings are most often fictional or mythological figures, recast in the realms of a personal cosmology. I choose the models for my painting from among my friends, seeking to show my characters’ humanity despite their mythological stature. Their narratives and relationships combine cross-historically, and in this way, their identities are liberated from the fixed tropes and standard depictions seen in much of the Western art-historical canon, even as the paintings themselves employ much of that familiar visual language: of hierarchies, of the sacred, and the profane. These ethereal goddesses, monsters, and aliens forge and assert their presence in their worlds, instantiated in their personal and eternal drama, or simply challenging the viewer to recognize their power.