My teaching is grounded in a structured, studio-based visual arts classroom where students learn through observation, experimentation, making, critique, revision, and reflection. I believe visual arts education should help students build technical skill, visual literacy, creative confidence, and independent artistic judgment. Students need clear instruction and strong routines, but they also need meaningful opportunities to make choices, test ideas, revise their work, and develop a personal visual voice.

Drawing remains central to my teaching because it strengthens observation, planning, patience, spatial reasoning, and visual decision-making. Whether students are working in drawing, painting, mixed media, design, or hands-on studio projects, sketching helps them slow down, see more carefully, and make their thinking visible. I treat drawing as a form of inquiry, not simply as a preliminary step before a finished artwork.

My classroom functions as an active studio. Students move through project sequences that include idea development, demonstrations, guided practice, material exploration, process checkpoints, critique, revision, artist statements, and final presentation. I want students to understand that artmaking is not only about producing a final object. It is a disciplined process of inquiry, problem-solving, persistence, and communication.

Critique is an essential part of this studio culture. I teach students to describe what they see, analyze formal decisions, interpret meaning, listen to peers, and revise with purpose. Critique should not function as judgment alone. It should help students understand their choices, strengthen their work, and build confidence in speaking about visual ideas. Assessment should also reflect this process. I value sketches, drafts, experimentation, reflection, revision, craftsmanship, participation, and growth alongside final outcomes.

I build inclusive classrooms through clear routines, visual scaffolds, demonstrations, adaptive project structures, guided practice, and multiple entry points. Students arrive with different backgrounds, confidence levels, prior arts access, and learning needs. A rigorous studio classroom must be accessible without lowering expectations. My goal is to help students feel supported enough to take creative risks and challenged enough to grow.

My broader experience in construction, logistics, design, production, and budgeting informs my teaching through organization, craftsmanship, material care, safety awareness, and project planning. I bring those habits into the studio classroom while keeping the primary instructional focus on visual art, 2-D media, creative development, and student growth as image-makers. Ultimately, I want students to leave my classroom with stronger technical ability, clearer visual communication, greater confidence, and the capacity to use creative thinking beyond the art room.

I am a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and visual arts educator whose work spans drawing, painting, mixed media, installation, performance, and related studio practices. My practice investigates how identity is shaped by environment, labor, domestic space, memory, material process, architecture, and the body. I am interested in the ways built environments hold personal and social meaning, and in how physical labor, repetition, and material engagement leave traces on both objects and people.

My work often connects the body to constructed space. Domestic forms, architectural fragments, tools, surfaces, thresholds, and repeated gestures become ways to examine memory, identity, and belonging. I am drawn to materials and processes that carry evidence of use: marks, residue, pressure, weight, repair, wear, and accumulated labor. These traces allow the work to function as both object and record.

A recurring concern in my practice is the relationship between making and endurance. Repetition, physical effort, and sustained attention are not merely methods of production; they are part of the content of the work. I use drawing, installation, performance, and mixed media to explore how action becomes form and how material processes can reveal psychological, social, and bodily experience.

My background in painting, 2-D studio art, interdisciplinary art, construction, and design shapes the way I approach artmaking. I move between image, object, space, and action, often using construction materials, architectural references, and bodily process to connect personal memory with broader social structures. Themes of identity and environment, domesticity and memory, labor and material process, architecture and the body, social sculpture, repetition, endurance, and physical transformation recur throughout the work.

Teaching and studio practice inform one another. In both contexts, I value discipline, iteration, material sensitivity, observation, risk-taking, and reflective decision-making. My work frames art as a way to examine lived experience, create meaning through materials, and understand the relationship between the body, the built environment, and the social world. Representative works include Work in Progress Series, Endurance Ladder Dives, The Constituted Torso, Corporal Housing, Blue Artist, HomeSweetHouse, and Paneled.