I went to Warren Wilson College, a small liberal-arts school in the mountains of North Carolina, where I worked on the college farm and majored in studio art. My dad was a photojournalist, so I grew up around photography all of my life and was always interested in it. It wasn’t until my senior year of college that I realized I had a stronger passion for it than anything else and that I wanted to try to make a career out of it. I graduated in 2003, and after a season as a wrangler on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, and a couple of internships at a newspaper and news service, I began my career freelancing in Washington, D.C., covering the White House and Capitol Hill. I eventually landed on the staff of The Washington Times, where I continued to cover politics, but also national and international stories. In 2011, I was offered a job at the Los Angeles Times and have been here ever since. In 2017 I was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Photography for a photo essay from Brazil titled, “Motherhood in the Time of Zika.”