As a journalist my inspiration was cultivated, quite literally, in my own backyard. I grew up working in and around the intensively cultivated wheat fields of rural eastern Washington. At the University of Washington, I focused on international agribusiness in Costa Rica.

After graduating, I returned to Costa Rica to live in the same plantation zone I had studied in college. After a year, I moved into the capital San José to work with the Costa Rican Conservation Federation in the months preceding the national referendum on CAFTA. My first photo series and article was published in La Nación in 2007, the same day as the referendum.

In 2009, I traveled to the villages of Teotitlan del Valle, Mitla, and Xaaga in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, to document an indigenous Zapotec community that had organized in resistance to multinational seed companies and contamination from genetically modified seed. My article was eventually published in La Jornada. Two years later, they also published two of my photos from Haiti.

Since 2009, I have been a dual MA student at the University of Texas in the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Department of Journalism. In the summers of 2010 and 2011, I went to Peru to to study the impacts of the Peru – U.S. Free Trade Agreement on non-traditional crop development, migration, and unionization in the asparagus plantations of northern Peru. My initial findings led to a publication in La República.

Most recently, I have written stories about domestic drones, campaign donations in the District Attorney's race in Travis County, Texas, and the plight of an undocumented student at Texas A&M University for The Texas Observer and Fox News Latino.