About

Long before my professional life became associated with international affairs and crisis management, I was making photographs, experimenting with film, and building a career in the creative arts.

In 2000, I made Smuggling Roses, an award-winning experimental short documentary about a young couple separated by the U.S.–Mexico border. Filmed in part from atop the border fence, the project reflected an early fascination with human experience, geography, and the boundaries that shape our lives.

Several years later, in Nicaragua, I co-founded and published El Puente (later EP Magazine), a successful bilingual magazine exploring culture, travel, and life in Central America. The venture brought together my interests in photography, visual storytelling, design, publishing, and entrepreneurship.

Art was one of the first ways I learned to engage with the world.

My professional path eventually took me in a very different direction. For much of my adult life, I've worked in international crisis management, often in circumstances involving conflict, uncertainty, and extraordinary human stakes. These experiences have brought me into situations where questions of truth, justice, freedom, and responsibility are anything but abstract.

My professional work demands clarity, judgment, and decisive action. Art offers something fundamentally different: a space for observation, intuition, and experimentation, without the obligation to explain or resolve everything.

Photography allows me to pay attention to people, places, light, and the details that might otherwise go unnoticed. Painting is more instinctive - an exploration of color, form, material, and accident. Both provide a kind of freedom that is difficult to find elsewhere.

Perhaps inevitably, certain themes recur across these pursuits: boundaries and crossings, freedom and confinement, order and disruption, and the relationship between what is visible and what remains hidden.

Yet I don't see my art as an illustration of my professional experiences. It exists on its own terms, even as the experiences of a lifetime inevitably influence how I see.

This website is a personal archive of those intersecting experiences and interests. It brings together photographs, paintings, films, writing, professional work, and selected references collected across different places and periods of my life.

Some of the work is recent. Some dates back decades. Much of it was created privately, without an audience or particular destination in mind. The archive has no fixed agenda; it evolves as new work, discoveries, and interests find their way into it.

Together, these materials offer something that no single photograph, news story, professional title, or public event can fully convey.

Not a definitive account, but a more complete one.