I was born in Newcastle, Wyoming, and grew up in a solid middle-class home with five sisters (and no brothers). Photography didn’t show up as some master plan—it showed up as a camera in my hands. My junior year of high school, shooting for the yearbook, Mrs. Proctor handed me a Nikon and said, “You will figure it out.” I didn’t know shutter speed from aperture. I just knew one direction on the dial made things darker and the other made them brighter—and somehow that felt like enough to start.

In 2011 I started college in range management at Northwest College in Powell, thinking I’d build a life around wild land firefighting. The program unfortunately was not for me, so I jumped ship into Photographic Communications and found mentors who gave me both craft and direction—Jayne Johnson, Craig Satterlee, Anthony Polvere, Gary Bakken, and Christine Garceau. Somewhere in that process I realized I loved teaching just as much as making, and one conversation with Craig about professorship lit a clear path: if I wanted to teach, I needed to keep going—eventually toward an MFA.

Utah State University shaped how I think about images: as stories, as arguments, as objects with meaning. It’s also where I made my first tintypes and fell hard for wet-plate collodion. Wanting more, I connected with Sylvia Weston of Silverstill where she showed me the ropes. 

A few years I left Utah and the Western US to seek an MFA in Communication Media Arts at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.  It was there in Ohio that I finally decided to start Silver Stained Tintypes, a practice centered on handmade, tactile photographs.

Today, I’m a Lecturer of Communication and the Assistant Director for Media & Entertainment at Kennesaw State University, where I teach across photography, photojournalism, and digital media production.

My teaching is rooted in inquiry and practice: asking better questions, making work, failing safely, revising, and learning to create with intention, ethics, and collaboration.

My wife and I met in 2011, married in 2012, and our three kids (2013, 2016, 2020) have been dragged—patiently—across the country for this life in images. They keep me grounded. The work keeps me curious. And I’m still doing what Mrs. Proctor promised: figuring it out.