I am an artist, an organizer, and a lifelong resident of the occupied Shawnee Territory, also known as southern Illinois. A graduate of Southern Illinois University’s School of Art and Design, I was awarded the Celine A. Chu Scholarship and named a candidate for the Rickert Ziebold Trust Award. My work—rooted in painting, encaustic, cold wax, oil pastel, and mixed media—is a direct response to the violent unraveling of ecosystems and human dignity across the globe.
Nature has always fueled my creative spirit, but in recent years, my art has become a vessel for processing a deeper, more entangled grief: climate collapse, political apathy, and systemic violence—not just against the planet, but against entire peoples. The crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, along with the harrowing legacy of residential schools that tore thousands of Indigenous children from their families, spurred a body of work aimed at bearing witness and raising awareness. These atrocities are not historical—they are ongoing—and they reflect the same systems of extraction, erasure, and dehumanization that underlie the destruction of our natural world. The ongoing, livestreamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has also profoundly affected me, further exposing the moral rot at the heart of global systems of power. My practice now holds space for both ecological and human rights crises, treating them as inseparable.
Over the past decade, I’ve fought at the grassroots level—against fracking, for clean water, and for climate justice. I’ve also worked to defend and uplift the rights of rail workers, advocating for stronger labor protections and a publicly owned, environmentally just rail system. The struggles of rail labor are inseparable from broader fights for climate justice: they sit at the intersection of corporate exploitation, decaying infrastructure, and the urgent need for sustainable transit. This work has brought me face-to-face with bureaucratic indifference, corporate greed, and fossil-fueled despair. But it has also sharpened my voice, deepened my rage, and compelled me to speak through my art in new, raw ways.
I draw on the philosophy of deep adaptation, approaching creativity as a kind of palliative care—a means of mourning what’s been lost, bearing witness to what’s being destroyed, and resisting numbness through acts of creation. My current work is not about offering hope in the traditional sense. It’s about honoring grief, embracing complexity, and refusing silence.
Education and Exhibit Resume