I'm a freelance writer and videographer based in north-central Iowa, though I like to travel. My photography projects have mostly been documentary: I enjoy sticking around a place for a while - be it a small Midwestern town or a metropolis in Southwestern China - to take images of both famous and personal sites, capturing them in the context of the people and events that form their surroundings. Yet by far my most widely-viewed photo is a snapshot of a friend who has a tattoo of "Final Fantasy's" Mog the Moogle on her neck.

From 2009 through 2011, I worked as a copywriter for Buena Vista University. I wrote news and feature stories for local media and university publications in addition to promotional/informational content about the school's academic programs for its website.

Past video work has included promotional videos for Wright Medical Center in Clarion, Iowa, that played at national and state conventions; a documentary about a north Iowa town's film festival that was used to premiere the movie of an actress originally from the area, the plot of which also was about a small-town actress who went to Hollywood and struck it big; and a faux newsreel used in a production of the musical "It's A Bird... It's A Plane... It's Superman."

I also have a strong interest in media - new, old, and social - and its changing methods of distribution and potential to better connect people in rural areas and developing countries. The internet, I believe, affords a great potential for people in communities of every size to share their art with each other and the world. I'm also fascinated by the scope of how media has globalized, as with how the history of Western cinema hit China en masse in the past decade thanks to a lack of international copyright enforcement, the ease of replication of DVDs, and file sharing networks. I researched this in 2005 as an undergraduate.

For my masters’ dissertation, I took a different track, researching avowedly non-religious summer camps in Texas and Oklahoma, exploring how digital communication is used in the formation of the community putting on the camps, as well as how it is both controlled and permeates (under restriction) the 'natural' environment of the camp itself.