When I was a child I wanted to be a lion. I drew comics about lions and made short stories about lions and characters going on fantastical adventures! By the time I was 10 I knew that I wanted to tell stories with pictures, not just about lions, but everything that came into my silly imagination! However, being African American my father was strongly against the idea. "The Animation and visual storytelling world is no place for a black person, especially a black female!" he told me. But my passion was too strong! I continued to draw and share my vision with my peers, winning many art awards and story awards in elementary school and middle school. Sometime in 2001 a little show called The Proud Family came out featuring a little black girl as its protagonist and my father finally became supportive. He saw how I could be a change to the industry much like Bruce W. Smith and Floyd Norman and that is exactly what I plan to do! My goal is to tell life changing stories featuring many characters of multiple ethic backgrounds and cultures! This way little black girls like me won't have to question whether being an artist is something they can do. There will be a surplus of stories that feature people who look like them. But I also want to go a step further than that…I want to create opportunities for these creatives by moving up the ladder from Vis Dev to Production Designer. I went to California State University Fullerton to major in Illustration and Animation. I took many Visual Development classes as well as Children’s book classes! During my time at Fullerton I had the pleasure of illustrating 8 dual language picture books for the school library at the National Resource of Asian Languages program which lead me to getting a lovely internship with Whimsical World Children’s books. I graduated in 2019 and decided to further my education by taking two Schoolism Classes called Visual Storytelling and Visual Development! Even then, it still was not enough. I wanted to learn more so I joined SCBWI for a year as well as taking a few storytelling classes with Storyteller Academy. In 2020, I applied to the Schoolism Black Lives Matter Scholarship and won, giving me access to over 20 classes to help further my visual storytelling skills. I decided to start a discord for me and the other recipients so we could learn and create together. I continued to apply to animation jobs as a visual development artist with very little luck though I made amazing connections. My art eventually caught the attention of Irene Goodman Agency who signed me on as an author/illustrator. I figured that since many of my favorite Art directors work in picture books, picture books serves as a great starting point for my career.