My Story

I’ve been lucky enough to work as a full-time artist for a great portion of my life with only an Associate Degree in Illustration and Graphic Design from the American Academy of Art of Chicago and a year of study at Columbia College of Chicago in animation and film.

I first found work as a greeting card illustrator for Joli Greeting Cards, then as a freelance animator/illustrator for various animation companies, including, Calabash, Sinnot, and Assoc., eventually landing a long-term gig as a storyboard artist/animator and ultimately Art Director for Kinetics on the VideoSmarts and ComputerSmarts projects. Then I jumped into the fray of computer artist and animator for the burgeoning Chicago game industry, working for Incredible Technology, Sega Midwest, Capcom Coin-Op, before moving to Louisville, KY to work as a partner/Art Director at Indigo Moon, Inc. I have a product history that includes a plethora of video and digitally published work. But the dot com crash of 2000 put the Indigo Moon out of business—swept away in the avalanche with other online developers caught up in the scandal of vaporware companies we were not at all a part of—as publishers stopped funding.

I found myself mid-life in a tight job market interviewing in an industry that didn’t seem to want me anymore. I guess I considered myself fairly lucky, as the game industry, with its brutal deadlines and hundreds of hours of uncompensated overtime, took a high toll on artists. Most of my former colleague’s burned out or opted out before they aged out, as I did.

I had to reconsider my future carefully at my rather precarious age. So, I decided to step back, go back to college, finish my art degrees and figure out what is my passion within that huge umbrella of art. Returning to school mid-life helped refocus my previous goal and assess my future options. When I was younger, I just wanted to be an artist and that was a rather broad, unspecified goal.

I ultimately received a BFA in Illustration from MIAD concentration of picture book illustration, a terminal MFA degree in Fine Art from Parsons learning a different language of visual storytelling using symbols and material to evoke emotional memories, and a terminal MFA degree in Creative Writing from The New School with a concentration on YA and children’s book writing.

I loved the collaborative effort it took to create video and game animation. I was immensely intrigued with the technology, and believe it or not, the challenge of making impossible deadlines. I even created a unique non-linear animation system for an online 3D ritualistic sword fighting game, that solved the problem of our game engine not having hit detection.

While I reveled at the challenges, making someone's visions come to fruition, it always left my storytelling voice out of the equation. I come from a family of great storytellers and now intend to use my talents to tell stories to children. This is the way I hope to finish my life in art. Writing and drawing and introducing children to artwork and new ideas. I’ve always wanted to spend my whole life making artwork and I’ll be infinitely grateful if that is my finale.

In the meantime, watch this website for an upcoming Products page, for future prints and published books.