I paint images worked until they nearly disappear.

Most begin somewhere else — a corner of a Veronese, a film still, the lining of a coat, an X-ray of my own spine. The first thing I do is remove whatever explained the picture: the figure everyone was looking at, the body that cast the shadow, the person wearing the clothes. What remains has to hold on its own.

I grew up backstage. Both my parents were classical musicians and I spent my childhood in the wings at Santa Fe, San Francisco and the Metropolitan Opera, watching things being staged. I studied scenography before I studied anything else, and the paintings are staged rather than observed: a curtain, a lit ground, a costume, a held prop, a back turned to the audience. They are built in layers and then buried. Earlier states stay findable underneath — a flag under burgundy, vertebrae under a bridge, a face scrubbed back to a ghost. Some of it can only be found standing close, and some only in raking light, which means the work doesn't fully exist in a photograph.

I trained at the University of California, Berkeley, in a degree taken across the Department of Fine Art and the College of Environmental Design: painting with Mary Lovelace O'Neal and Christopher Brown, ceramic sculpture with Peter Voulkos and Vaea Marx, mixed media with Anthony Dubovsky, architecture with Lars Lerup. My honours thesis was on how the Russian Revolution reshaped stagings of Hamlet. Two years at Bryn Mawr followed, auditing graduate seminars in art history and French continental philosophy.

I have painted continuously since — through studio work at Beverley Street Studio School in Virginia, Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago, and a juried shared studio affiliated with Aspect/Ratio Gallery — and through a career as a clinical and forensic neuropsychologist, in which I was required to speak precisely and never personally. Painting is where that restriction doesn't apply.

I completed the Royal College of Art's Contemporary Art Summer School in 2026. I live and work in Lisbon.

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