I like to say I was born into the African Methodist Episcopal Church, raised Black Southern Baptist, and matured within the Diasporic tradition of Southern Hoodoo. The latter expanded my spiritual palette to learn and even adopt some elements of traditions like Kemetic, and Indian yoga philosophy, Ifa, and Buddhism–hence the moniker Byzantine Hoodoo–and icons spanning from “Theotokos Greets Eve” and St Basil of Caesarea, to Japanese Zen pioneer Sozen Nagasawa Roshi, and Zora Neale Hurston with the energy of the orisas serving as her archangels in the background. While my collage art practice began in grade school, with wallets and purses from newspapers, magazine clippings, and duct tape—using images and texts that honored Black music artists in pop culture—my spiritual and academic sojourns are foundational to how I have come into the sacred art practice of image writing (or iconography).

I visited a Zen Buddhist monastery in the summer of 2025 and began documenting my experience through mixed-media photo-collage. Along with my personal experience with Southern Hoodoo, I started a contemplative series called peace Colleague, in which small pieces of paper were used as backgrounds for the focal images, lending themselves to their own version of the block mosaic patterns from early religious art. My academic sojourn began and focuses primarily on the contemplative aspects of Jesus and the early Christian movement. As ideas for the peace Colleague series continued to come, I was led to a focus on early Byzantine Christian basilicas and monasteries, and have since embraced iconography as my visual art practice. 

There is an aspect of relational prayer among icon-artist-viewer-world that I find most intriguing about iconography. Mystery and revelation insist on blurring their own lines of dichotomy–where differences become unique opportunities for engagement, learning, and growth. I still have a lot to learn and am super excited and eager, yet remain humbly mindful and diligent with where the practice can lead. The image in the background is my first completed icon ever! ahh!! And I can only imagine iconography to deepen my passion and commitment to contemplative art, practice, and education.

to sacred image writing,