Education

Advising Committee: Cathryn Carson (chair), Massimo Mazzotti, Daniel Sargent Jacob Gabourey  

B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz - 2013                                    

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley - 2022

Dissertation: The Astronomical Realists: The Social Mechanics of Visual Documentation, Art, and the American Space Age, 1944 - 1987

The American philosophical society, budd hopkins and david jacobs fellow, 2024 - 2025

The Huntington Library, octavia E. Butler Fellow, 2023 - 2024

University of Southern california, center for science, technology, and public life, Berggruen Institute Fellow, 2022 - 2023

University of California, Office of the President, Office of graduate diversity Dissertation fellow, 2021 - 2022

Lawrence livermore national laboratory, center for global security research, summer research fellow, 2021

smithsonian national air and space museum, Guggenheim predoctoral fellow, 2018 - 2019

NASA HIstory office, southern california field historian, abacus technologies, 2024 - present

wende museum, guest curator, competing cosmos: Interpreting the sky, November 2026

Berggruen Institute, Future Histories, editor and contributor, 2023

California institute of Technology, Getty PST, Crossing over: Art and science at caltech, 1920 - 2020, Exhibition Contributor, 2021 - 2023

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Getty PST, Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary imagination, Exhibition Consultant, 2023

peer reviewed articles

SOFIA: The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. NASA History Office Report. NASA SP-2025-4901. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2025.

“Between Science and Fiction: NASA’s Voyager Missions and the Visualization of the Space Environment.” In Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020, 46–52. Pasadena, CA: Caltech Library in association with Getty Publications, 2024.

for public audiences

“The Frontier Proxy: Why Paintings of Jupiter Look Like Death Valley,” Alta Journal: Issue 29, September 12th, 2024.

“The Empire of the Dandelion,” in Future Histories, Life Otherwise, Berggruen Institute, 2024.

“What is AI Doing to Art?” Noema Magazine, April 11th, 2023.

“Space Art: A Modern Movement,” in The Beauty of Space: Space Art from the International Association of Astronomical Artists, Vol. 2. Springer, 2020.

book reviews

“Through Astronaut Eyes: Photographing Early Human Spaceflight by Jennifer K. Levasseur.” Book Review, Technology and Culture, Volume 63, Number 1, (2021): 289–91.

“When the Western Frontier Met the Final Frontier,” Review of Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier, by Catherine Newell. Journal for the History of Astronomy, November 2019, Vol. 50, Issue 4. pg. 499 – 500.

“Aliens in the archives: A conversation about the History of the UFO phenomenon,” with Greg Eghigian, the American Philosophical Society, October 30th, 2025

NO EVIL: Echoes from the Forest. Sci-Arc gallery event with Jennifer Chen and Spiros Michalakis, April 7th, 2023. Full video of conversation.

“The Frontier Proxy: Material Links between Astronomical Illustration and the Western Tropes of the American Space Age, 1944-1987” Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Contemporary History Seminar, December 16th, 2022.

“How to Paint What You Can’t See: Lessons from Astronomical Illustration,” NYU Space Talks, NYU Arts and Sciences, February 22nd, 2022.

“What’s New in Aerospace,” Facebook Live. Apollo 50th Anniversary at the National Air and Space Museum, July 2019