Background & Education

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. I have recently returned to teach digital art to high school and middle school students in LA during the school year. Which points back to myself as a teenager, I co-published two zines, Ink Disease and Emissions with Antonio Lopez. We utilized self-publishing as a way to disseminate collage imagery, photographs, drawings, music reviews and writings expressing our political and cultural views. I attended UC Berkeley and graduated with honors in 1989 with simultaneous Bachelor of Arts degrees in the Practice of Art and Peace & Conflict Studies. The latter is a trans-disciplinary major, which allowed me to examine ways to facilitate a peaceful and just society through art, film and literature. The combination of concentrations reinforced my belief in art as a powerful tool for both self-expression and social change. I spent my junior year at the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest Hungary, which allowed me to examine the art of revolution and propaganda more carefully. During my last year I put those lessons into practice as an intern at Artists' Television Access (ATA). I began my Master of Fine Arts degree at Visual Studies workshop in Rochester, NY. And I completed it, with a photo-digital concentration in May of 2002 at SUNY Buffalo.