The question beneath my work is straightforward: how do we live with what has been torn within us, between us, and around us without looking away? For me, repair begins with acknowledgement: naming the injury, registering the loss, and refusing the pressure to smooth it over or move on. Only then can mending begin, not as a reset but as a process—partial, visible, and ongoing.

Loss, trauma, mourning, and witnessing run through everything I make. I’m interested in how loss is metabolized (or not), how people protect themselves from the unthinkable, and how meaning evolves over time within relationships. I work in series and long-term projects, returning to subjects over years rather than resolving them quickly. This sustained attention has shaped bodies of work addressing social injustice, PTSD, and moral injury, and, more recently, the environmental crisis. In my series, Portraits of a Precarious Earth, I approach damaged and disappearing landscapes not as neutral scenery but as vulnerable subjects — sites where human action, denial, and responsibility are inscribed. The work asks how we bear witness to environmental harm without aestheticizing it away and how attention itself might become an ethical response.

I’m an artist working in photography, a filmmaker, a writer, and a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma and complex mourning. These roles are not separate; they form a single practice. Psychoanalytic training has taught me to listen for what is spoken and what is withheld, for what appears indirectly in gesture, tone, and the objects people keep. In the studio, I work with the same attention. I don’t treat images as declarations. I treat them as encounters; places where contradiction, vulnerability, and resilience can sit side by side without being forced into closure.

Formally, my practice often begins with the camera but does not end there. I work with photographs as physical objects, not merely representations. I intervene on the surface, tearing, burning, puncturing, reassembling, suturing, and layering physical prints. These actions are not embellishment or disguise. They are the content. I want the photograph to carry history, its vulnerability, and endurance, so the viewer meets not “perfect” beauty but a surface that has survived. The repair is visible; the scar is not hidden. I document what exists, then build a second truth on the image’s skin, the way people build second truths about themselves.

I care deeply about the image’s materiality, its weight, grain, fragility, and resistance, and I’m drawn to the edge of the photograph, where the frame typically contains and controls. Sometimes I let the photograph resist that containment. I push the boundaries of two dimensions by layering prints, lifting corners, building relief, and letting thread, paper, and tape move the image into space.

I want the work to register viscerally, engaging the senses and the body. A puncture is not just a mark; it’s a small act of violence and a record of it. A burn is not only a formal device; it’s an interruption that changes what an image can hold. Stitching can be read as repair, but also as urgency: as what must be held together, what cannot be restored, and what is still in need of care. Beauty matters here, too. I use color, light, and formal balance as thresholds that allow looking, especially at what many people would rather avoid. But I try to keep beauty ethically awake. The goal is not comfort; it’s attention.

My engagement with women’s issues is longstanding and specific. In my psychoanalytic writing, editorial work, and community practice, I’ve remained close to feminist questions, with particular attention to motherhood and maternal subjectivity, how attachment, memory, and mourning shape a mother’s inner world, and how cultural ideologies press on women’s lived experience. I’ve written about female development and sexual difference, including how “difference” can illuminate women’s complexity or be used to confine it. I also address embodied experience, including infertility, reproductive loss, and the stigma that often surrounds them. Across these efforts, the aim is consistent: to broaden what is thinkable about women’s inner lives without reducing them.

That commitment extends into my filmmaking and community-based work. In my award-winning feature-length documentary, Leave No Soldier, I deliberately included women who have served, including Vietnam-era nurses as well as female soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their presence pushes back against a cultural reflex that frames war experiences and moral injury as exclusively male stories. For me, this insistence on visibility is an ethical intervention that foregrounds women’s labor, endurance, injury, and post-war psychological lives.

The same ethical stance shapes my photographic series My Own Witness. It uses black-and-white portraiture and charged, familiar objects to make social fracture intimate, entering the body, the face, and the domestic and national imagination.