I’ve spent much of my career exploring the relationship between creativity, systems, access, and community. While my background began in theater, fabrication, and multidisciplinary artmaking, my work gradually evolved toward building organizations, educational systems, and shared spaces that help others create.
I believe creative organizations function best when they are built in collaboration with people. The most meaningful spaces I’ve worked in have been those where people feel invited to participate directly — where artists, beginners, fabricators, students, hobbyists, and curious community members can learn from one another, experiment openly, and build confidence through hands-on practice. Much of my work is focused on creating those kinds of environments. .
Make Santa Fe
As Executive Director of Make Santa Fe, I’ve helped grow the organization from a small makerspace into a multidisciplinary creative hub serving artists, makers, educators, entrepreneurs, fabricators, and students throughout Santa Fe. During my tenure, the organization has grown from roughly 70 members to more than 230. I’ve expanded its educational programming, community events, public engagement, and earned-income sustainability.
At Make Santa Fe, my work focuses on building accessible systems that support long-term creative participation. This includes developing educational tracks and hands-on learning pathways, increasing public programming, strengthening organizational infrastructure, supporting workforce development initiatives, and helping create opportunities for artists and makers to pursue sustainable creative work.
Much of the organization’s growth has come from a community-centered approach. Rather than treating the space simply as a fabrication shop or studio, we’ve worked to position Make as a form of creative infrastructure — a place where people can learn, collaborate, experiment, teach, and develop meaningful relationships around creative practice.
Public Programming & Community Building
A significant part of my work focuses on creating opportunities for people to participate creatively together. Throughout my career, I’ve developed workshops, meetups, public programs, collaborative events, and instructional initiatives designed to make creative practice feel approachable and accessible.
At Make Santa Fe, this has included hackathons, community maker events, educational programming, public workshops, and interdisciplinary efforts that bring together artists, fabricators, technologists, educators, and small businesses. I care deeply about building places where experimentation is encouraged and where people feel permission to learn by doing.
Workforce Development & Creative Economies
My work explores how creative organizations can support economic mobility, workforce development, and sustainable creative practice. Through Make Santa Fe, I’ve helped develop pathways that connect hands-on technical training with entrepreneurship, fabrication, and the creative industries.
This work includes educational systems focused on digital fabrication, woodworking, welding, ceramics, design technologies, and interdisciplinary making, as well as service contract programs that allow makers and fabricators to apply their skills to concrete projects. I believe creative spaces can become powerful civic infrastructure when they provide both cultural and practical support to the communities they serve.
Educational Philosophy
I believe people learn best through participation, experimentation, and direct engagement with materials, tools, and processes. Much of my educational work focuses on helping people build confidence through hands-on practice while creating environments where curiosity and failure are treated as important parts of learning.
My approach to education is deeply interdisciplinary. I’m interested in the space where traditional crafts intersect with emerging technologies, where fabrication overlaps with storytelling, and where creative practice becomes a vehicle for collaboration and community-building. Whether teaching scenic design, fabrication workflows, digital technologies, or community workshops, I try to create systems that remain accessible, collaborative, and human-centered.
Theater, Fabrication & Interdisciplinary Practice
Before moving into nonprofit leadership, much of my career centered on scenic design, fabrication, and collaborative production. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre Arts from the University of Idaho and have contributed to more than 150 theatrical productions nationwide as a scenic designer, fabricator, and collaborative creative lead.
That background continues to shape how I think about leadership and creative systems. Theater taught me that meaningful creative work is fundamentally collaborative — built through communication, trust, shared problem-solving, and collective effort. Many of the systems I develop today are still rooted in those same values.
Alongside my leadership work, I maintain an active creative practice spanning photography, scenic design, sculpture, woodworking, fabrication, and interdisciplinary installation work. My projects often combine traditional crafts with electronics, fabrication systems, lighting, and responsive technologies as a way to explore new forms of interaction and making.
Looking Forward
I remain deeply interested in how creative organizations can function as spaces for connection, resilience, experimentation, and public participation. My work continues to explore how accessible systems, collaborative environments, and interdisciplinary creative practice can help strengthen communities and expand opportunities for meaningful cultural engagement.