My image-writing started with mixed-media torn-paper mosaics and academic research and writing in comparative religious studies. However, I’ve always embraced a pretty solid spiritual life, which can be foundational for an iconography practice. 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. Southern Hoodoo 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. So if I think back, that is where it really began for me—a Texas girl on a spiritual quest—and here we are today!

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 torn 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 image writing (or iconography) as my visual art practice. 

There is an aspect of relational prayer between icon-artist-viewer-world that I find most intriguing about the sacred art practice of iconography. Mystery, yet revelation insists on blurring their own lines of dichotomy–where differences are simply unique opportunities for engagement, learning, and growth–a process found within the actual practice of iconography as well as something I imagine the early Christian icons and their teachings were seeking to convey. 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.

Please check out the different series tabs. If you would like to commission a piece, please reach out here.

to sacred image writing,