Bio
A native of the Florida panhandle, Katie has left a piece of her heart everywhere she has lived- St Augustine, West Virginia, Philadelphia, Denver, and most recently, Houston, Texas, where she lives with her 13-year-old daughter and her husband and partner, Chris.
Katie completed her business degree at the University of Florida and, after a year in a high rise in Philadelphia, she followed her heart back to school- art school! She focused in Photography at the now-defunct Art Institute of Philadelphia, chosen for its awesome dark room program.
Although focused in photography, Katie soon realized she had found her passion in art in general. She drank in lessons in color theory, design, art history, and art psychology along with the elements of photography that she still sees pop up in her art.
After building a successful business in fine art portrait photography coupled with branding design and consultation for women creatives, Katie had to pivot. After a move for her husband’s medical fellowship, like so many mothers, she found herself with a toddler and little support. Being a natural light photographer- or anything that couldn’t be done from her little studio room tucked upstairs next to her daughter’s room- just wasn’t going to work.
This sent Katie on a path into mixed media art, starting with a jewelry line and eventually moving into her current mixed media practice using materials as varied as pantyhose, silk, and cardboard.
Over the past 15 years, Katie’s work has shown at the Sketch Club in Philadelphia, Gallery 13 in Asbury Park, NJ, Core Art Space and Kanon Collective in Denver, CO. In 2019, Katie’s solo show, Connections, was displayed in Houston, Tx. She has also curated many pop-ups as well as events for the Denver Photo Betties, a professional organization she founded in 2013.
In 2020, in a culmination of her skills, experiences, and passion for helping other women artists, Katie opened Roaring Artist Gallery, a virtual art gallery exhibiting the work of emerging women artists. There, she has been able to spread her wings as a curator, exhibition designer, and consultant and mentor to other women artists.
Artist Statement
Life is full of textures and emotions and colors and movement- strings of human experience linking us to each other, to moments behind us, to the Creator. In art and in life, I am mad about texture, a student of emotions, forever fascinated with the colors that mix on my canvas, and entranced by how movement can be frozen in fabric sculpture. Working intuitively, my art feels like exploration almost more than creation, as though I am tugging on those strings to see the world each piece wants to become. Along with the joy of that creation, however, comes the heaviness in exploring which of those strings I have collected throughout my life must be cut off and left behind as I go. Amidst materials such as fabric, paint, beads, precious stones, and even cardboard and pantyhose, I find myself in a sacred space, allowing these strings to lead me into something tangible. My hope is that my viewer will feel those strings connecting to her, as well, and allow herself to get caught up in them, as I have.