Biography

I was raised in Los Angeles and acquired an interest in photography at an early age as my father exposed me to lab procedures, when he would turn one of our homes rooms, into a darkroom. On family trips to Yosemite National Park, where he would lift me up to look through the ground glass of his “twin-lens Rollie”.  At Hamilton High School, in Los Angeles, I took photography as an elective and excelled using a 4×5 Speedgraphic camera, as well as other formats.

I was encouraged by my teacher, Dwayne Carter, who had a background in art, to consider photography as a career.  While pursuing photographic studies at California State University Northridge, I purchased my first 2 ¼” format camera, a used Hasselblad. At this time I was also active in groups such as “Cameravision” and “Women in Photography” which is currently ‘Women in Photography International“(WIPI), where I was a “Founding Member”.

After college I worked in the Ohio State University, Photography Department, where I created photographic teaching tools for the faculty, who at the time were using “glass lantern slides” for lecturing around the country.  This stage of my career also marked my first “sale” of a print to a teacher working in the Ohio State Art Department. 

The next years were devoted to using 4×5 field cameras and 35mm formats. In the late 1980s I produced a documentary series of Sunset Blvd., to show the multi-cultural nature of the City of Los Angeles.  In the 1990s I concentrated on hand-tinting of both landscape and abstract images and a produced a series of hand-tinted detail studies, the “New Mexican Pueblos” and an abstract series of  demolished gas stations that I called, “Station Break”. 

Since 2002 I have been working with digital imagery on a series of  triptych color landscape work titled “Elements”, and an ongoing series of “Elephant Seals” of the California Coast.  Using Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as a base I have created a children’s book entitled, “Once upon a time in Yellowstone”, the story of a young bison’s migrations with his family from Yellowstone National Park to Grand Teton National Park.