about
I’m a visual journalist specializing in documentary and multimedia storytelling based in Lima, Perú. I remember learning to roll my Rs when I was 9 years old; Spanish has been part of my life ever since. While in college I studied for six months in San José, Costa Rica at the University of Costa Rica. I spent the last year volunteering for a Spanish immersion preschool in St. Louis, International Schoolhouse, where my Spanish vocabulary grew. But I wanted a bigger classroom and better vocabulary; Lima gives me both.
Photo by Oscar Durand
I graduated from the University of Missouri with a Bachelor of Journalism in 2006 and then moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to work as the Online Photo Editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. While working as the Online Photo Editor I created the first web home of multimedia at the newspaper, trained the photo staff in multimedia shooting and editing and locked myself in a room to edit videos of boot camp for two months with videographer David Carson. We came out with an Emmy award for the project called Reporting for Duty. And in 2009 I was part of a team that was recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting for the paper’s coverage of the Kirkwood City Hall shootings.
After two years of editing, I missed the streets and became a staff photographer.
In St. Louis I also worked as an adjunct professor at Webster University, where I taught classes in photojournalism and multimedia production. I three times directed the photo sequence at the Greater St. Louis Association of Black Journalists’ Minority Journalism Workshop and in the summers, I teach for National Geographic Student Expeditions in Bar Harbor, Maine and Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands.
When I’m not taking pictures or in the classroom, you can probably find me eating a wonderful ceviche or dreaming about ajÍ amarillo.