I was a late bloomer. My passion to travel didn’t become fully realized until late into my twenties – by the time society would say is too late.

I had done the normal American path. Go to school, graduate and get a job right away. Work day in and day out, month after month for just two weeks of time off a year. “I should be happy I have job security,” I would repeat to myself. “A steady job is hard to come by.” Many of my friends had graduated college, got jobs in our field and then were promptly laid off. Their successive years bouncing between odd jobs, hoping the job market would recover. I had gone to a pretty good journalism school right around the time that online publishing was exploding and the old guard newspapers were imploding. The last paper I worked at, The Rocky Mountain News, no longer exists. It is but a fading memory of a combative two-newspaper town at the foot of the Rockies. The Rocky was the highest awarded paper of the 90s winning multiple Pulitzers for both writing and photography. And yet just two years after shutting down, a Pulitzer-winning friend of mine was bar tending and waiting tables.

I was fortunate to grow up in a home where both of my parents valued multiculturalism and exploring your world. My maternal grandfather had been a potter by trade, but loved to travel the world as a photographer. His photos of Angkor Wat are seared in my brain. My mother got her first Master’s in Indian Art and spent 6 months living in India with my dad during his residency for medical school. Our home was decorated with statues of Vishnu and furniture from Indonesia. And when I was ten, my dad remarried an Italian woman, and I was exposed to a whole new culture. Many years later my stepmom told me that I had inherited more of an Italian upbringing than either of my two half-sisters.

Post college, I went on two transformative trips with my two best friends to 8 different countries throughout Europe. These trips showed me that I needed to get out of my comfort zone and spend time abroad as my parents have done. And so it was in secret just over a year ago that I started feverishly researching and planning my escape.

I would travel the world to all the far-flung places I had seen in National Geographic. And document the trip for myself, friends, and family returning to my roots in photojournalism. And with that the Nomad Photographer was born.