I am a painter and educator from Kansas City, Missouri (b. 2000), and my work merges narrative and metaphor to explore themes of identity, conflict, religion, and surrealism. Rooted in personal experience, I use still life as a structural framework to construct layered compositions in which each object functions like a word or sentence—reliquaries and found materials arranged to carry emotional and symbolic weight. These constructed scenes become a language through which I can process and reframe the stories that shaped me.

Working primarily in oil on canvas and drawing on paper, I build environments that blur the line between reality and imagination. My upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian group had a profound effect on my worldview and creative impulses. Many of the stories I was told in childhood—moral parables, spiritual allegories, and struggles with judgment or salvation—became internalized scripts. I often imagined myself inside these narratives, questioning how I might act, survive, or change the outcomes. That desire to inhabit and reinterpret storytelling continues to inform my work today.

My practice draws aesthetic and conceptual influence from artists such as Kara Walker along with Lewis Chamberlain, Edward Hopper and Heironymous Bosch. Their use of contrast, compositional drama, and narrative helps to inform the way I handle tone and atmosphere. I often utilize saturated colors with stark lighting and strong shadows to create an environment of tension and intimacy. In recent works, I have turned to my own journals as source material. These writings, which are done before and in between each painting, help shape both the tonal trajectory and formal decisions in each piece, allowing memory and internal dialogue to drive the storytelling. The result is a kind of pictorial narrative that feels both intimate and expansive—firmly rooted in personal history while engaging broader themes such as conflict, identity, and transformation.

Currently, I am developing a new body of work as part of my MFA thesis at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This series expands my narrative practice into a fictional world that explores a space that is like a brand new playground in terms of worldbuilding. Through this evolving project, I invite viewers into surreal scenes where memory, identity, and belief become tangible objects.