I am a visual art educator, community organizer and early stage art critic, enthusiast and artist interviewer. In my artistic community life, I value critical research and dialog around radical, transformative and anti-institutional art practices. Criticality in relation to ideas of "authentic portraiture," personal storytelling, and how self expression represents itself in image portraiture remain ongoing themes within my photographic practice. In my research and teaching practice, I focus on commodity culture in relation to representational artwork, the importance of slowness, failure and privacy in our creative processes, the negotiation and power of relationships and relational presence in one's art practice and what it means to make art within the scarcity based crisis of global capitalism.