About me

I am a multi-faceted person… though I suppose we all are.

My first love has always been horses. My mom is an avid equestrian, and even pregnancy couldn’t stop her from climbing into the saddle, so she rode for much of the very first beginnings of my life, while I was in the womb. My earliest memories are of the kindness of horses and the freedom of being on horseback.

I was fascinated with my grandmothers piano as a small child, and always loved to sing. I started playing the flute at age 9, and competed for a few years. I thought the saxophone was really cool, so started playing that at 13. Then, my sophomore year in high school, I tried out for chamber choir and was accepted! I didn’t have time for horses, band and choir, so I gave up band.

I dropped out of high school my senior year. It was a bad decision, but I was surrounded by poverty and hopelessness, and other people making bad decisions. I spent the next few years working minimum wage jobs and trying to get my GED. Eventually I did, and went to college.

I have to insert a side note here (which turned into a not-so-side-note, sorry), because this had a huge impact on various aspects of my life and the various ways I look at things that have happened in my life: I was born with deformed eustachian tubes in my ears. My early childhood was full of painful ear infections, which caused scar tissue to grow up around all of the tiny bones in my inner ears and I lost most of my hearing. At the age of 10, my grandmother realized that I couldn’t hear her unless I was facing her (I had learned to read lips), and I received a hearing aid. I have had multiple surgeries to restore hearing in my ears as an adult. Despite this pain and lack of ability to hear clearly, I have been obsessed with music and language for pretty much my entire life. At this point, I play autoharp, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, keys, saxophone and flute. I can sing lead, I can sing harmonies. I have performed on all of these instruments in front of crowds of up to a few thousand. I have studied and achieved various levels of fluency in French, Spanish, German, Russian, and a tiny bit of Ukrainian. I even once communicated with a fellow traveler in Portuguese, without ever having studied the language!

When I was a kid, I prayed every night that God would give me the ability to hear. I journaled about it. It was my one biggest desire for years and years. And at the age of 20, I finally got my first surgery to remove the scar tissue covered bones and install a titanium implant that would function as those bones. It was a dream come true. I get my second surgery 6 months later, and when the flu caused an ear infection that destroyed my hearing in 2007, I got surgery again.

Now, my hearing is not perfect. I prefer people be on my right side because that is my “good” ear. If things are too noisy for me to sleep, generally I just roll my head over and cover my right ear and we are good to go. But, I don’t wear a hearing aid (which really suck to be honest), and I mostly get by okay without it. Most folks don’t realize that I don’t hear so good, so sometimes I warn people that if they are talking to me and I don’t respond, I may not have heard them.

This “disability” that I was born with taught me a couple of things:

1. Anything, absolutely anything is possible. Like seriously! I have this extremely rare condition. As a teenager the talk was “well there are experimental surgeries, which involve risks,” and my mom didn’t feel comfortable making that decision for me due to the risks involved. By the time I was an adult, I was able to get my ears fixed. My dream as a child! This fact is a never-ending source of hope in my life.

2. Don’t let things that should, by all accounts, hinder you, hinder you. Just do what you want! How does a basically deaf kid get to a point where she can play the flute well enough to win at competitions and consistently be seated in the top 3 seats in band? How does a basically deaf kid get to sing well enough to try out for and get into the top choir in the state (at that time)? By just going for it, and going for it, and going for it some more. Just keep going. If you are doing what you love, eventually you will get there.

Photo of me and my old Arabian mare Negabask’s Fatima (GW Negabask x Allah’s Akasma). Photo by Mint Queen.

I took these lessons with me when I eventually went to college. I didn’t think college was possible when I dropped out in my senior year. But I cleaned up, stopped using drugs, got a job, and purged most of my associates. This was the hardest part of getting clean, but IMO it is absolutely necessary to separate yourself from the folks who are continuing to use. Fortunately, my boyfriend at the time was also getting clean, so at least I had some support. Unfortunately, he was very abusive. I needed a stable job and my brother had been doing tech support at Stream International, so I got a job there. I did it for a good number of years… 5? maybe? and during that time was able to become financially able to afford to live on my own, made new friends at work, and left my abusive boyfriend. I started seeing someone who lifted me up and encouraged me to go to college, since I had wanted to for so long. So I did.

College was interesting, in so many ways, because I had been exposed to so few options as a poor kid in a small town. My mom had been a hairdresser, then worked at the paper mill, where my grandpa (who was also a cattle rancher) and my aunt worked. My uncle drove trucks. My grandma worked in the bakery at Safeway. My other grandpa was a high school teacher. My dad was a drug dealer (fortunately he was not allowed visitation). There were so many fields of study that I had never considered and that made it extremely difficult to choose a course of study. I went to community college first, and at first thought I would take a science track, but I reached a point in the Maths where I couldn’t keep up. The lessons just weren’t sinking in and I didn’t understand things. Maybe it was the teachers fault, I don’t know — I assumed I just wasn’t a maths person (despite my adoration of the logic of algebra!) and I switched to the “Math for the Arts” courses and decided that science wasn’t meant to be.

I loved my art history and my french classes! During this time I lived in France and taught English in a small town at a high school. For a small town girl who never thought I would ever get to go to Europe, well, it was another dream come true.
But when I got back, I had to decide what to do. I consulted many folks. “It doesn’t matter,” they said. “Just getting a college degree is all that matters. It doesn’t matter what it is in or how much it costs.” That was the popular line of thinking at that time, I think. Everyone wanted their kids to have the opportunities that come with college degrees, and didn’t think that what you studied actually mattered. And, they all seemed to figure that no matter what your degree, it would pay for itself. Ha. Ha. Haha.

So, I had a stint studying interior design at a private university and realized that I wasn’t going to be able to bankroll that degree, and then enrolled in the International Studies program at Portland State.

I loved studying language and culture and I got to live and study in Russia. I have minors in French and Russian. At the time, I was super into sustainability and took a bunch of sustainability classes. I believe I was one of the reasons they developed a minor in sustainability, after I pointed out that I had more sustainability credits than Russian credits and lamented that I couldn’t call it a minor in Sustainability. I did all kinds of leadership activities, held an internship at Mercy Corp, another at the Department of Environmental Quality, and graduated with honors. During the recession. With my student loans coming due, I was feeling very much that I had wasted a lot of time and money getting a degree. I eventually got a job as the Event Program Coordinator at a nonprofit. It both required a college degree, and did not pay enough to pay for that college degree.

(Note: this is as far as I have gotten in my re-write that encompasses more of me than just photography :) I will add more as time allows)

I picked up my first SLR camera in 1998, but beyond some photos of my own horses, it never occurred to me to photograph horses - or even to make a living on photography. But in 2011 that changed when a design client asked me to photograph his real estate listings. For a decade, I photographed numerous subjects for my commercial clients, including interiors, architecture, food, artists, musicians and business people, and even became an FAA certified drone pilot to capture images from the sky. In 2016, I started photographing horses and their people.