About the designer

I was born and raised in Newport Beach, CA. My mother is a social events writer and publicist for a home design magazine and my father is a commercial property manager. All I wanted to be when I was growing up was an artist and an inventor, though I recall the most specific job I ever pined for in those early years was to set up LEGO displays. Thankfully, my parents were open-minded enough to support my admiration of construction sites and insatiable dumpster-diving tendencies at a young age, only demanding a reasonable plan of action for any oddity I would bring home.

Throughout high school I became increasingly fascinated by psychology and biology in an effort to better understand people and how they operate in the world. As I started college at San Francisco State University, I realized Clinical Psychology wasn't for me and chose instead to follow my passions and pursue Industrial Arts, a degree that was later changed to Product Design and Development. I explored the world of furniture design as I became increasingly aware of how large of a role ergonomics and human factors were in the development of design solutions. The program afforded me an opportunity to spend a year at Brunel University in West London where I was able to expand on my personal and professional interests. The program focused on the engineering and manufacturing elements of the design process, balancing out SFSU's focus on client programs and aesthetic concerns.

After graduation, I sought out work experience that would give me real-world skills in the production and installation of furniture and casegoods in an effort to understand how the projects that I was designing would ultimately be implemented. Working for clients and industry professionals was a deeply humbling experience and I felt fortunate to be working alongside some of the most skilled craftsmen I have ever known. Their mastery pushed me on a daily basis and operating in a professional environment allowed me access to far more practical methodologies of fabrication than what was presented in my previous classes.

Several major life changes caused me to re-evaluate the work I was doing, culminating in a decision to go back to school and further my understanding of furniture and the built environment at Academy of Art University. I chose the program at AAU because of its emphasis on technical proficiency coupled with a keen sense of the end user's needs. This program has given me the ability to work with students from a variety of cultural and professional backgrounds, further expanding my exposure to such a broad field of expertise.

It is this wide range of professional skills, honed over a lifetime of developing design sensibilities, that I bring to the world of design and seek to further expand upon and refine each passing day.

"The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths... The places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time."

Gaston Bachelard

The Poetics of Space