About Me

I am yet another Bay Area photographer, but with a lowercase-p because I didn’t go to school for fine art or photography. Instead, I studied music composition at the University of Southern California and started out in film music, working as a music assistant for Randy Newman on The Princess and the Frog and Toy Story 3. I spent the next several years in Beijing, first as a staff composer at CCTV News English and then composing music for advertising campaigns for Audi, Jaguar, and Volkswagen. I then went back to school for data science at Columbia University and now work as a lead machine learning engineer at Disney, the same company I'd been a music assistant at fifteen years earlier. Music composition taught me that form is what makes art legible over time. Data science taught me that information hierarchy is the most essential pillar for clarity in communication.

We live in a high-information-density society where the signal to noise ratio is overwhelmingly low. When we are all short on attention and drowning in static, the most empathetic virtue in communication is clarity, earned through structural hierarchy and economy. If art is communication, and photography is art, then I apply these priorities of empathetic clarity to photography as well. So, my first priority is always form: the arrangement of shapes and values has to hold before the subject or the story matters. The artists I return to for inspiration aren't really photographers at all: Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Olafur Eliasson, Donald Judd. What I take from them is an attention to edges, scale, repetition, and surface, and to how a thing is perceived rather than what it depicts.

I am a hermit who would rather live in the mountains, but I must make do with a life that insists otherwise. So, I live on Treasure Island: close enough to San Francisco, but also keeping it at arm’s length. Treasure Island is the focus of my current project: Treasure Is Land.

Solo Exhibitions

2026

• helloart, 185 Berry Street and Sargeant Ma, China Basin, San Francisco, CA

Group Exhibitions

2026

• SCA Open 2026, Sausalito Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA. Juried by Nancy Lim

  (SFMOMA), Danielle Fox, and Chester Arnold

• Under Many Moons, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Sebastopol, CA. Juried by Patricia

  Wakida

• TAPE UP: The Members Show, SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA

Publications

2026

• “Reassembled from Rubble: Impressions from Temple Hopping in Indonesia,” 35mmc

• “I Photograph Landscapes, But I’m Not a Landscape Photographer: What Paul Strand Taught Me About Looking Past Genre,” 35mmc

Professional

Music