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Artist Profiles
An intimate look into the lives and creative practices of artists. In their own voices, they share their work, their process, and the experience of bringing something into the world.
Operation Rainbow 2018
In 2018, I joined thirty unpaid volunteers on a medical mission to Guatemala with Operation Rainbow, documenting surgeons providing free orthopedic care to children and young adults with little access to specialized medicine.
I saw a boy walking with his legs bent backward, his body forming a bridge. I saw a broken arm held together with a piece of wood nailed into place. Nearly seventy surgeries were performed in two weeks.
I had been a nurse for five years, and watching these medical professionals pour themselves into their patients brought me back to why so many of us entered healthcare in the first place. It was also the beginning of my documentary work: shining a light on people in need and the people who dedicate themselves to helping them.
On the final day, the lead surgeon, Dr. Gus, noticed I was favoring one leg. A torn ACL, I told him.
Months later, he reconstructed my ACL in Los Angeles using a cadaver ligament, waiving the $59,000 surgical fee. I stayed with Dr. Gus and his wife, a nurse practitioner, while I learned to walk properly again. Their generosity has stayed with me ever since.
The film premiered in San Francisco and raised $90,000, funding Operation Rainbow’s next two missions abroad.
Dior 2023
Miniaturist Rachael Ferris led the team of artisans behind Dior’s Carousel of Dreams at Saks, a ten story facade and series of Christmas windows created for Fifth Avenue. Each one was a hand built miniature of a New York or Paris landmark.
I photographed the extraordinary precision behind it: figures painted at fingernail scale, a facade wired with nearly three hundred thousand lights, entire city blocks built to scale in miniature.
Then the windows opened, and the craftsmanship became spectacle. Every ten minutes, crowds gathered in the cold to watch the light show play across the building.
I wanted to photograph both the hands behind the magic, and the wonder they created.
National Geographic 2021
In November 2021 I spent four days aboard the research vessel Sharkwater, filming great white sharks for an hour-long SharkFest episode for National Geographic. We worked off Point Conception, a stretch of the Santa Barbara Channel often called the Cape Horn of the Pacific for its converging currents and rough, unpredictable seas. In four days we counted sixteen great whites. I shot boat to boat, rigged a monitor to a painter's pole to see what the underwater camera saw in real time, and ran a bite-cam that put the lens right at a shark's jaws as it closed. It was exhilarating work, on some of the roughest water on the California coast.