I am a multidisciplinary artist, educator, published writer, and non-clinical art therapist from Chicago currently living in Brooklyn with my two teenage daughters. I’m interested in the ways we can combine contemplative practice and expressive arts to heal and empower individuals and communities while supporting environmental restoration and social transformation. I believe creativity is a birthright that plays an important role in our individual and collective health as we navigate big societal changes.

I am a certified in Expressive Arts Therapy through an Indigenous lens after studying with Indigenous Wisdom keepers from the Cree/Anishinaabe and Metís Nations in Canada through the WHEAT Institute in Manitoba, Canada. I have an MFA in film from the Art Institute of Chicago and a certificate in Contemplative Psychology from the Nalanda Institute at the Tibet House in New York City.

I enjoy and appreciate the many layers of culture, spirit, and innovation that can be found in New York City. Yet, I’m also a bit haunted by the fact that we’re living on the unceded ancestral land of the Lenape people. I often imagine how this city was once a beautiful wilderness, carefully tended for millennia by Native peoples. I’m drawn to and inspired by the hints of wildness that have managed to survive and make themselves known through the city grid.

I see Pier One and Pier Three in Brooklyn Bridge Park, now inhabited by countless species of native plants, trees and birds, as a wild, liminal edge--a luminous glimmer of the land’s once rich and melodious ecology. The paintings, prints and collages featured in this show are based on my encounters with birds and plants on these piers.

I aim to infuse my subjects with the lyrical, the melodious, the fluent, free and expressive triumph of their beingness. The visible world seems to be only a thin strip of shore to the magnificent, teeming mystery that is life on earth. This work is a whimsical return to source; an attempt to “be with” and honor the natural world; to learn and observe more deeply.

The larger-scale paintings such as the Night Heron roosting in the trees and the Hummingbird feeding on jewelweed are based on early morning sightings at Pier One.

The Meadow Lark collages are compositions of gelly plate prints and paintings of browning wildflowers and plants foraged from the park. I pulled from many of the prints I created during The Meadow’s many community printmaking workshops.

The sketchbook still lifes of flowers and vases were inspired by the ancient notion of Flower Worlds. Many Indigenous peoples understand the many healing properties of flowers and even believe flowers are the messengers from the spirit realm. Each still life attempts to spontaneously express and contain the invincible magic we experience in our encounters with flowers.