About me.

I grew up in Memphis, spending childhood Saturdays at the Brooks Museum and adolescent evenings doing Josef Albers color theory exercises I'd borrowed from a neighbor who was getting her BFA.

I wasn't sure then what I was training for. I have better sense now.

I studied Visual Art and Art & Archaeology at Princeton, which my father described as the world's most useless degree. He came around, eventually, when I landed a job and paid off my student loans.

What that education gave me (and what art continues to give me) is a particular way of seeing: the habit of asking how things are different, how they're the same, what changes when context changes.

It turns out that's useful for almost everything.

Coaching leaders through transitions. Making a linocut. Writing an essay. Figuring out what a stationery business is actually about.

By day I serve as Executive Director of the Semmes Murphey Foundation, a neuroscience-focused research and education institute in Memphis. The work involves organizational strategy, leadership development, and the particular challenge of helping serious scientists communicate what they do to people who aren't scientists. I find it clarifying.

I'm also a certified coach through the International Coaching Federation, trained at the Holistic Coach Training Institute. That training honed a natural talent for working one-on-one with leaders at moments of meaningful change. Sometimes that looks like new roles, expanded scope, or the quiet crisis of outgrowing a story that used to fit.

The through-line across all of it: close looking. Whether I'm working with a coaching client, pressing ink into paper, or writing an essay about why art might save the world, I'm doing essentially the same thing: trying to see what's actually there, and helping other people do the same.

In 2023 I gave a TEDx talk on human creativity and AI — specifically, what we risk losing if we stop valuing the kind of thinking that only humans can do. It grew from a decade of writing at the intersection of art, attention, and the examined life.

I live in Memphis, where I was born and where I keep choosing to stay.