Planning taught me to read the systems beneath ordinary life.
I live in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and spend much of my work thinking about how places are built, explained, photographed, filmed, remembered, and misunderstood.
I came to planning through curiosity. I wanted to understand why some places felt coherent and others felt fractured. Why a road could divide a neighborhood. Why a bridge could become part of someone's sense of home. Why public decisions, often made in fluorescent rooms with technical documents on the table, eventually became the texture of daily life.
For years, I worked inside that machinery. Regional transportation plans. Federal compliance. Maps. Meetings. Funding programs. The work was technical, but the questions underneath it were human.
Over time, I became less interested in credentials and more interested in translation. How do you help a person see the thing that is shaping their life? How do you explain a project without flattening it into jargon? How do you honor the complexity without hiding behind it?
That question led me toward filmmaking and photography. A camera asks for a different kind of attention. It notices light, posture, weather, silence, and scale. It helps public work become visible again.
This site is the personal side of that work: a place for notes, images, films, questions, and observations gathered along the way.
A life outside the official bio.
Most of what has shaped me has happened away from a title: family, faith, long runs before sunrise, old tools, small repairs, books marked up in the margins, and years spent learning from people whose lives did not fit neatly into a plan.
I trust slow attention because it has changed how I move through the world. It makes the work more patient, and the questions more honest.