as far back as i can remember issues of poverty have touched my life. my parents divorced when i was seven years old, after which i was raised by my mother. due to financial constraints we moved every year or so. while inconvenient, this afforded me the unique opportunity to experience divergent versions of "reality" in various parts of southern california. and so from an early age i witnessed the disparate distribution of resources that correlates with class and ethnicity in the places i lived. this would later inform a critical perspective of global social issues.

i inherited my great grandfather's honeywell pentax thirty-five millimeter camera when i was seventeen years old. with this camera, i began to document the world around me. i have since embraced the advantages of digital photography, though i still prefer the intimacy of film, photo paper, and chemicals in the quiet of a dim darkroom.

i spent time in ghana, méxico, and guatemala between 2007 and 2011. my experiences in those countries profoundly shaped my understanding of global inequities today, demonstrating to me how poverty disproportionately affects women (particularly women with children), and highlghting the relationship between appropriation of "third world" arable land for export-oriented agriculture and the escalation of global migration.

i completed my undergraduate educaton at mills college in oakland, california, finishing with a bachelors degree in political, legal, and economic analysis with a focus on the developing world. after college, i went on to pursue a masters degree in human rights studies at columbia university. my graduate work focused on the relationship between international capital flows, governance, and economic and social rights. my thesis addressed a human right to food in the context of a global demographic transformation, an ecological decline inherent in industrial food systems, and a capitalism that commodifies the means of subsistence - food and the productive resources that yield food.

as the world becomes evermore urbanized, the ineluctible linkages between urban and rural livelihoods become evermore evident, as do the patterns of resource distribution between (and within) the global north and south. academia has trained my eye to focus on issues of food sovereignty versus food security; the intrinsic import of economic rights and ecological sustainability for poverty reduction; and the empowerment of women and marginalized peoples everywhere if people anywhere are to subsist on this delicate planet.

my goal is to bring awareness to these complex issues while expressing a beauty and hope that tenaciously persists if we let it. apathy is the new opiate of the masses. by honestly seeing the intricate links between global consumption and advsersity we can identify - and empower ourselves to undo - the links that tie us to the suffering of others.