I don’t know if I ever consciously chose dance… I just always found my way back to it.
Growing up, I was lucky to experience movement through a lot of different spaces and cultures. I went to temple and participated in performances there, and over time even got to choreograph a few. One of my favorite memories was choreographing *A Thousand Buddha Hands* for my senior project. Dance showed up in a lot of forms for me: jazz, Tahitian, contemporary, hip hop, ballet. Somewhere along the way, I became fascinated not just with learning choreography but understanding the history behind movement and why dance looked and felt different across cultures. Even in college, I kept taking dance classes and found myself pulled into learning more about movement and expression across different cultures. I think that’s what I love most - there isn’t one way to dance. Dance can be celebration, ritual, discipline, rebellion, storytelling, grief, connection, and joy, and I feel really lucky that I got to experience pieces of that. At the same time, photography was quietly growing with me too. I remember saving lunch money so I could buy myself a little digital camera and bringing it everywhere. I took pictures of everything: random moments, friends, places, things that probably felt important only to me. Then later I started playing around in Photoshop and realized I loved creating worlds and preserving moments. Looking back now, I don’t think dance and photography were ever separate things. They were always hand in hand.
Life happened after that. I stepped away from dance for a while, became focused on other things, and became a mom. But movement never really left — it just changed form. At one point, I fell in love with yoga, which felt like a softer way of moving and helped me reconnect with myself and find strength through life in a different way, especially becoming a mother. Later, I found my way back into dance again and eventually discovered pole dancing and aerial, and something kind of clicked for me. I realized I never actually stopped loving movement — it had just changed forms over time. Looking back, I don’t think I was ever attached to one style. I think I’ve always been drawn to different ways of expressing the same thing. Dance became yoga. Yoga became pole. Movement became photography. Photography became another way of preserving movement. And maybe that’s always been part of who I am — not one style, not one medium, not one identity… just someone who loves exploring and creating through different forms of expression.
I love exploring movement across forms: dance, yoga, pole, aerial, photography, storytelling. For a long time, I thought I just had a lot of different interests, but looking back now I think they were always connected. Some people devote themselves deeply to one thing, but I’ve always naturally moved between different forms of expression and never really felt the need to choose. Maybe that’s why photography feels so connected to movement for me. Both ask us to notice, feel, create, and express something that’s hard to explain with words. And when I eventually found my way back into movement more fully, I realized something that surprised me: dance was never just a hobby and photography wasn’t either. They were both ways I stayed connected to myself through different seasons of life. Coming back reminded me how important it is to be noticed, not in a performative way or for attention, but in a human way. To move, to create, to take up space, to let yourself exist and express yourself.
I really think that’s part of health too. And maybe that’s what I want to cultivate now, spaces where people feel free to move, create, explore, and be seen.
Maybe I’ve always just been a multidisciplinary artist in love with different forms of expression, and maybe this is my way of bringing them together.
