About Me
Born and raised in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, my lifelong fascination with nature and natural landscapes was initially seeded during childhood hiking, camping, and paddling trips with friends and family, both in the woods and waters of my home state and in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York (a place my extended family has pilgrimaged to annually since my grandmother was a child). This eventually grew into a keen interest in how humans in different parts of the world understand, utilize, shape, and are shaped by local environments, and particularly environments that are protected through conservation. Propelled by this interest, I studied geography as an undergrad student at Macalester College in St. Paul with a concentration in nature-society relationships. Afterward, I spent several years working in outreach and education positions for conservation organizations and agencies in the Twin Cities area, including the U.S. Forest Service, Wilderness Inquiry, Three Rivers Park District, and the St. Croix River Association (now the Wild Rivers Conservancy).
Beginning in my early teenage years, I had always furiously documented my explorations of different places and environments through photographs. Whether it was a local excursion I took on my own, a day or overnight field trip for work or school, or an extended getaway to somewhere further afield, I was constantly snapping images to record what I felt to be the essential visual and geographic characteristics of the place I happened to be visiting. After college, I upgraded from the fixed-lens Nikon my parents had gifted me several years earlier to a Canon DSLR and began learning the finer points of photo composition and post-processing. As I honed my skills, photography quickly became integral to how I personally understand and relate to place and the environment. To this day, I still do not feel that I’ve truly been to a place until I’ve spent some time photographing it.
Somewhat unexpectedly, my interest in photography ended up influencing where I chose to go to graduate school. In 2020, I began my graduate studies in applied geography at New Mexico State University (NMSU), drawn in large part by the opportunity to work with an advisor who specialized in the geohumanities, a subdiscipline of geography that engages closely with the arts. For my Master’s thesis, I curated a digital photo exhibit as part of an ethnographic study I conducted on water-society relationships in southern New Mexico. Shortly afterward, I began my doctoral research at NMSU, embarking on a similar ethnographic study U.S. public lands artist-in-residence programs. My doctoral research aims to understand how public lands sites work with artists to influence perceptions, imaginations, and narratives of public lands sites through artwork. My photography, in addition to being an escape from the pressures of academic life, explores my own affective, aesthetic relationship with places and environments that capture my imagination as a geographer.
