I grew up in the Midwest, and many of my earliest memories are of time among trees and in the water of nearby lakes, where I felt more at home than almost anywhere else. I was a sensitive child who held a great deal in my body. I felt things fully, long before I had words for them, and often had nowhere to put them. It took me years to understand that this sensitivity was not something to manage, but simply my nature and a valid way of being in the world.

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For as long as I can remember, art and working with my hands gave my feelings somewhere to go. Dreams spoke similarly, through images instead of words, and they have held my curiosity ever since. This more subtle kind of knowing has always felt to me like water beneath a field: unseen, easy to forget, and feeding everything above it.

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For a long time, that knowing stayed in the background, present in what I made creatively but not yet something I could explain. My path to the present has been winding. There have been seasons of grief, of pain I carried physically, and of coming apart and putting myself back together in new shapes. In my early twenties, things began to turn. I was working as a jeweler, and while my hands were busy, I filled my days with audiobooks and podcasts that gave language to experiences I’d never been able to name. I steeped myself in how trauma lives in the body and mind, and in the more transpersonal edges of consciousness. I began practicing mindfulness and yoga, and slowly my relationship to internal experience shifted. Becoming a yoga teacher gave me a steadier, more authentic sense of self, and these threads led me to Naropa University, where I trained in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and Transpersonal Art Therapy.

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It was in graduate school that I finally found language for how art had been serving me my whole life. It was a way of amplifying images, following where they lead, and staying connected to my body along the way. That became the research question I’m still living inside: what happens when we stay in relationship with an image or experience instead of trying to explain it? I continue that inquiry in my studio, where an image or dream will often take shape in clay or paint before it’s finished with me.

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I love this work because it points people back toward their own wisdom, trust, and self-sovereignty. It’s also flat-out fun. Spending time with images, art materials, and dreams is restful, a break from the cognitive mind and into a state of being rather than doing. More than anything, I want to help people return to that early place of knowing, the part of themselves that understood things before words categorized their experience.

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