I have been drawn to all expressions of art for as long as I can remember.
I majored in Film Studies at Vassar College, back when film editing meant physically cutting 16mm film and taping it back together, often at 2am, while blasting music with your friends in the basement of a beautiful, ivy covered building. I wrote my thesis on The Pygmalion Myth in Hitchcock Films, yet also drank horrible cheap wine with my roommates while watching Melrose Place in our townhouse, where mushrooms grew in the bathroom because we were having too much fun to notice or care.
I later attended ITP, a two-year graduate program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, whose mission is “to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies.” I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into with this program, yet had the unbelievable luck of landing there at the literal dawn of the internet. The fact that I was able to live in NYC for almost a decade, during both the birth of the internet and the heyday of hip-hop, will never cease to blow my mind. I remember sending my first email to a friend, and then calling her (on a land line) to ask if she received it. She did, and we laughed and screamed in disbelief. What was this?! The best of times.
I worked for many years in the film and television industry in New York, at ABC News, Lemle Pictures, and Martin Scorsese’s film production company, Cappa Productions. Being a personal assistant to a living legend is a best and also worst job; I think I will leave that right there. With my dear friends, I co-founded Girls on Film, one of the first blogs on the Internet (although we didn’t yet have the term “blog”), and got paid to write pop culture reviews and co-author a book; I worked as EP of the site until it was sold to Oxygen Media.
After moving north to Boston and then Newburyport, Massachusetts, I first picked up a paint brush, and also opened a boutique shop for women’s clothing, jewelry, and footwear. A life completely different from my NYC life, but amazing in so many other ways.
Over the years, I have enjoyed experimenting with watercolors and acrylics, and photos and collage; after taking classes at RISD, Montserrat, and local studios, I have landed, for now, in an exploration of mixed media.
In addition to art, I also love: family, music, kids, dogs, kids, volunteer work, thunderstorms, driving kids everywhere, hearts and rainbows, walks on the beach — but only in the morning and at night, books, friends, kids, walks in the woods, good food and wine, kids, sunsets, walks on rocky coastlines, smart people who are also funny, and kids. I love Mark Bradford’s work and Sally Mann’s photos. Also: social justice and inclusion. Really. Really. Please. Let’s work harder to make things better for more people.
Soundtrack of my life: New Order, Smiths, The Specials, A Tribe Called Quest, Lumineers, Velvet Underground, Wilco, De La Soul, Avett Brothers, Taylor Swift, Tallest Man on Earth.
I live in beautiful Cape Ann, Massachusetts, with my two kids and two dogs. All four of them are extremely cute and mostly well behaved and I love them all even more after this past crazy year.
My personal motto: Leave it better than you found it.
Thanks for visiting.