Experience designer, photographer, and creative director building beautiful things at the intersection of design, culture, and craft.
Explore my workSomeone once told me you should build a career around the one thing all your friends call you about. For me that has always been design.
Home design, instructional design, brand design, editorial design. The modifier changes but the instinct stays the same: I pay attention to what makes a space, a system, or an experience feel like it was made with care.
I spent my twenties seeking out new cultures and environments. A sea turtle conservatory in Costa Rica. A language homestay in Guatemala where I obsessed over indigenous textiles in the Antigua market, certain the patterns would show up in Anthropologie within a few years. (They did.) Backpacking through Europe. Traveling Mexico and New Zealand with my family.
Guatemala taught me that real travel means becoming part of a place, absorbing everything from the culture to the aesthetics to the environment, until it shifts your entire perspective. I travel to seek inspiration from the world around me and bring it back home to inform how I live.
Professionally, this thread runs through fifteen years of instructional design, photography, creative direction, and editorial work. I build end-to-end learning experiences at Central California Alliance for Health. I founded a photography brand called Sunshine Lady. I write a Substack called TheCreativeMiddle about creative identity and modern folk living.
All of it is design. All of it is the same question: what does it take to make someone feel like they belong in a space?
My photography lives in that faraway space between documentary and dreamlike. Whether capturing a family portrait, an interior, or a landscape across the world, the goal is always the same: make the viewer feel like they were there.
For fifteen years I have designed curricula, playbooks, and training systems for organizations ranging from nonprofits to healthcare. The work is always user-centered: start with what people actually need, then design the experience that gets them there.
Redesigned onboarding and continuing education for a 1,700-person healthcare organization, translating stakeholder interviews and user feedback into scalable playbooks that reduced training time while improving outcomes.
Conducted organization-wide needs assessments to identify gaps between what employees experienced and what leadership assumed, then designed targeted learning interventions grounded in real user data.
Built asynchronous and blended learning experiences for higher education, designing interactive modules that balanced accessibility with editorial-quality visual presentation.
Reimagined a 1961 gas station in Fort Collins into a co-op bike café serving ethically sourced Central American coffee while showcasing rotating artwork by women artists from the same regions.
A 1961 gas station on Garfield Street in Fort Collins, reimagined as a community-owned bike café. The concept marries three obsessions: cycling culture, ethically sourced Central American coffee, and the women who grow it and make art from the same soil.
Every coffee on the menu is paired with its origin story and a rotating piece of artwork by a woman artist from that region. Customers do not just drink coffee. They experience the farm, the culture, and the craft behind it. The co-op structure means the community owns the space, and programming—group rides tied to featured coffee regions, artist talks, workshops—keeps it alive beyond the counter.
Between my Substack (TheCreativeMiddle) and my Sunshine Lady blog, I write about creative identity, travel, modern folk living, and the refusal to let anything be ugly.
What happens when you stop calling it a hobby and start calling it who you are? On creative identity, the messy middle of motherhood and career, and the moment you decide to take yourself seriously.
Read on SubstackOn traveling with kids, chasing Spanish fluency, and why immersing your family in a new culture is worth every moment of chaos.
Read on Sunshine LadyOn creativity as identity, researching it during grad school, and the tension between being a creative person and living inside the monotony of carpooling.
Read on Sunshine LadyFrom a purple Vivitar at age ten to developing black-and-white in a high school darkroom to shooting Fuji 400 on a Nikon F100 in New Zealand. A love letter to the craft of analog photography.
Read on Sunshine LadyI did not just take photos or write posts. I built the brands themselves: the name, the visual language, the editorial voice, the audience. Creative direction is not a line on my resume. It is the way I work.
A photography brand born from loss and rebuilt through beauty. Warm, approachable, rooted in the belief that nothing should be ugly and nobody is actually gone. Specializing in portrait, lifestyle, and editorial photography.
View Sunshine LadyA Substack and editorial brand exploring creative identity, modern folk living, and the art of curating a life that looks and feels like it belongs to you. Written for women in the middle of their lives who are just getting started.
Read TheCreativeMiddleCurrently based in Denver and San Francisco.
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