I became a full time jeweler and beader following a medical negligence induced double simultaneous  stroke and heart failure at the end of  May of 2022 and subsequent heart surgery in the fall of 2023 that left me permanently disabled and unable to work outside of my home studio. This also ended my decades long award winning documentary photojournalist and street photographer career as well as my 30 year role as a community and public death & grief companion.

Prior to this I maintained both an full time art career, a full time corporate career in clinical HR/headhunting, and a cultural role as an end of life doula, grief coach, and educator in the death care space, peaking during the pandemic.

If you would like to know more about my past exhibits, awards, and projects as well as view my full CV please feel free to reach out via the contact page.

I am a self-taught beader with a some lessons passed down by other Native beaders and elders. my work is both a repository and an amalgamation of my Indigenous Turtle Island/ Abya Yala and Jewish roots. I use traditional techniques and skill to create contemporary design. From cave paintings to pottery; traditional bead weaving to street art, these are the stories of mi familia, mi corazon.

I began beading a couple years ago but it wasn’t until I became disabled that beading became a way of life, an adaptation to the temporary loss of the use of my dominant side. I was still beading right out of the hospital using my non-dominant hand. Unable to get early intervention, it became a self-led occupational therapy and a transmutation for healing. 

I see beading, clay work, and metal craft as storytelling. In my work, I weave the stories of those who have passed on. These stories intermingle with chapters of my childhood, grief from displacement and loss, the poetry of my people before me, and the stardust of ancestral memory.

Beading is communication, a language I share with others, quietly whispered in the wisk wusk of silver needle and nylon thread through glass beads; those orbs of earth fired medicine.