Hi. I’m an American-Australian interdisciplinary artist with an aversion to writing about myself in third person. My projects tend to be more about the method than the medium, but writing and photography are cornerstones of my creative practice. I’ll use whatever a concept asks for, though – which has included everything from matchsticks to ferrofluid to RFID tags.

I used to be a journalist, and in the early 2000s I wrote a fair bit about the enchanting confluence of technology and art that was happening then, including the emergence of ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) and other experiments in transmedia storytelling. Alas, most of my writing from that time has fallen off the edge of the archival cliff. Vale, America’s alt-weekly press. The world is a less interesting and more dangerous place without you.

Im 2006 I went on to do an MA in Creative Technology at the University of Salford, where I started digging deep into technomagic. In addition to a Tarot installation using those aforementioned RFID tags, I made an oracle out of spam email, and some terrible 3D renders of a gazebo because the university thought that forcing us to learn animation would make us employable. (Joke’s on me: I could really use those 3D design skills now.)

After moving from the UK to Australia I spent a few years creating pervasive games and other theatrical delights with these excellent people. One of my favourite projects was our branching narrative street game version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and I will forever be delighted that my co-designers said yes to my idea of letting players get (temporarily) tattooed with a secret symbol to signify their allegiance to the underground.

I then spent four years wandering the laneways and marginal spaces of Melbourne, doing a creative practice PhD that – as is the case with most PhDs – began as one thing, ended up turning into a completely different thing, and yet somehow managed to become exactly what it was meant to be. Unsurprisingly, it’s about magic. It’s also about uncertainty, and how we can traverse that liminal space with wonder instead of fear when we rediscover our ability to take creative risks.

I’ve always said that the experience of doing my PhD was like four years of self-directed art therapy. Having the freedom to be fully immersed in my creative process for that long, at a time when I felt both utterly disintegrated and completely frozen, changed my life. It saved my life. Looking back, I can see that the arts have saved me so many times across the years – as creator, audience, participant. And so in 2024 I commenced a Masters in Therapeutic Arts Practice at the MIECAT Institute in Melbourne. So far it’s been the most challenging and the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. Onward.