Artist Statement

I am a media studies major at Hunter College, and through my work I aim to explore popular culture and celebrity media - particularly the way in which it permeates and impacts our day-to-day lives, as well as how we collectively interact with such media. Having grown up in a period of hyper celebrity surveillance - the early aughts - many of my earliest memories are tied to the Hollywood stars I gleaned on glossy pages and glowing screens. One of my first flirtations with the celebrity press was being handed a copy of People magazine by my mother, dated a year shy of my birth, about the late Princess Diana; and then at a blissfully naive five years old, I caught an episode of Anna Nicole Smith’s self-titled reality show, left playing on the TV in my family’s living room, my dad distractedly plopped on the couch and busy with the newspaper in his hands: I was hooked, swept in the rapture of this buxom blonde slurring words with palm trees swaying behind. As I grew older, I became as intrigued by her life as I did by the societal consumption of her tribulations, and in an era when another reality television staple (who once wined and dined the aforementioned Smith, way back when, and promised her a future role as his First Lady) dictates our everyday existence from the confines of the Oval Office, I believe my lifelong fascination to be particularly relevant. Though I’ve mainly spent the past several years channeling my interest through writing, I hope to expand it to video - whether it be through nonfiction documentary work, or another form.