Here’s a little bit about who I am, what I do, and what’s important to me.

I grew up in small Southern towns and then studied art at a big state school. In college I focused on traditional printing techniques, completely ignoring the digital field growing around me. Between classes, I worked at the first free standing college library in the country. It was in this special collections repository that I fell in love with archival materials. So much so that upon completion of my B.F.A., I was torn about which path to take: art or library science. A painting professor asked me why I needed to choose. Why not both?

In 2006, I accepted a position at a liberal arts college library in Portland, Oregon, where I shifted from traditional library cataloging to metadata applications to workflow automation and programming. I was lucky to have two incredibly supportive mentors who fed my hunger for mashing up design, data, and code. When the library created a small Digital Initiatives department, I was invited to join. During my 6 years as Digital Projects Developer, I built several academic digital projects, some supporting grant-funded faculty research and some supporting experiential learning on campus.

On the side, I started taking on freelance work, building digital libraries for knowledge sharing organizations outside of academia. Through this side hustle, I saw an unmet demand for technical support: organizations and individuals with digital collections and specialized technical needs but without funding to employ full-time developers. Seeing this opportunity to help and feeling a desire to collaborate across public and private sectors, I left the library to venture out on my own.

I’ve been on my own as a designer, developer, and metadata wrangler since 2015. My work focuses on improving the design and usability of digital collections, helping to broaden the reach of these collections, and shining a light on the stories within these collections.

Back in my printmaking days, I started making prints because the print is considered a "democratic medium," making fine art available and affordable for the masses. Today, I do what I do to help archives tell their stories to more people.