I was born in San Francisco in 1969, and live and work in San Francisco's Mission District. I began painting in oil as a little kid alongside my aunt, who at that time painted landscapes en plein air, and took classes in drawing and painting at CCSF and elsewhere from the mid '80s through the 1990s . In 1999, I received the Merit Fellowship award from the San Francisco Art Institute, where I studied painting under Pat Klein and briefly, Brett Reichman. Following that, circumstances took me away from painting for almost two decades. I began showing work in the spring of 2023.

There was a time when writing, which I could do on an airplane, in a parked car, or in bed when I wished I was sleeping, filled the space where painting wasn't.  I was awarded the Atheneum Fellowship in creative nonfiction at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland, Or. in 2018. A few essays I wrote have been published in various  journals, linked to below. One of those, "Good Morning, Heartache" is cited in an open-source creative writing textbook published by Northern Iowa University in 2023 to illustrate the use of synesthesia as a descriptive mechanism.
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