I spent the majority of my younger years skateboarding around Southern California. When I was 19, I opened my first (legitimate) business – a skate shop in Riverside, California called Crooks. By 20, I was enrolled at the University of California Riverside (UCR) studying anthropology and history and by the end of my time there at 22, I had become an obsessive academic and given up the business to pursue knowledge instead of handrails.

Over the next five years archaeology took me to 13 countries and on countless expeditions. My most memorable was three months in the Yucatan Jungle of Mexico with UCR. My work there got me into two great schools to pursue underwater archaeology as a graduate student – James Cook University in Queensland Australia and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. After visualizing spending days on end floating in cold Scottish Crannogs, the choice was pretty easy. I completed my Masters degree at James Cook University in 2005. My Masters research was on the submerged landscapes of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe.

Between 2005 and 2008 I worked in Alturas, California for the United States Bureau of Land Management and in Hawai’i for Cultural Surveys Hawai’i and later for my own firm Heritage Pacific.

My exit from this life coincided with an increasing interest in film and photography as well as acceptance into a PhD program at Royal Holloway, University of London where I completed my PhD in February 2012.