I have always been creative, studying advertising in college and working in graphic design for many years. I was born in Los Angeles but followed the call for exploration and new places. Eventually, I settled in Austin and have lived here much of my adult life. Austin is a great town — smart, creative, hip, friendly — back then and still now. It was here that I dove deeper into my creativity. I learned fine art welding and blacksmithing here. I earned a graduate degree in art history at UT Austin. I love the exploratory twists and turns of learning new things and am continuously stretching backward in time and forwards in technology with my interests.

But as is so often in life, I found myself at a crossroads and picked the sensible path. And so, the last fifteen years of my work-life has been spent at a desk occupied with business tasks. More recently, I found a bit of room in my schedule to bring creativity back. Leaning heavily on my long-ago graphic design skills and sensibilities, I began working with my travel photographs. When I began my new art adventure, I had recently returned from Istanbul, Turkey. My head was filled with memories of a place that literally sits on layers upon layers of civilization and art.

Back home at my computer, I found myself simplifying and burnishing those images until only the most essential aspects remained. Then I would add other layers back into the composition. Some of these layers were purely digital, others were based upon millennia-old artisanal traditions. Each work is a recreation of the memory of place and time. My artistic process is a digital breakdown-then-rebuilding of images which, coincidentally, is very similar to how our brains store and retrieve memories.

Of late, I have been feeling the need to connect more physically and tangibly with my art process rather than purely digitally. I have a

lifelong love of printing and paper. This year, I am exploring fine-art printmaking, using my digital art files as a starting point. Reaching even further back to childhood lessons from my mother and grandmother, I have a deep respect for needlework and textiles. I am now adding needle, bead, and thread embroidery to my digital collages to create mixed-media originals. The last few years as a new-media and mixed-media artist have been the most fulfilling yet. I continue to reach forward in curiosity and backward to reclaim my personal history.