The short version

I’m a photographer/visual artist with a background in design. 

I have proudly worked for theatre companies like Orkater, Via Berlin, Cello Octet, Maas theater & Dans, and Silbersee, to name a few. I’ve also shot many theatre plays on the Dutch Island of Terschelling, during the famous Oerol festival, where plays are situated mostly outside in nature. For the Ragazze Quartet I have made various campaign visuals like the one for Radio Rusland. Last year I shot and designed the album cover for Finnish Jazz pianist Aurora Hentunen (and soon we’ll start working on the artwork for her second album!) For Next Nature Network I visualised lab grown meat dishes for a fictional cookbook called Bistro in Vitro. The book won a Dutch Design Award in 2014. For Next Nature Network’s more recent project Hubot -a job agency for humans and robots-, I also shot all the visuals. After its launch during Dutch Design Week it has made it into numerous big newspapers, and the project is currently touring the world as an exhibition. For Yoga International Magazine I shot a reportage on the amazing Lamu Yoga Festival (Kenya), and late 2018 I flew with Dutch top chefs, sommeliers and organiser Guustronomie to New York City to document them putting Dutch cuisine on the map in the iconic James Beard House.

The longer version: 

As a young girl I always wanted to go to theatre school in order to become a star. In those days my mum lovingly called me drama queen so it seemed a good fit. Since the age of five I was following weekly dance and music classes, I thought I had it all figured out. But horror struck when I actually got the second lead in a play aged 16. Turned out: I couldn’t actually act very well. Even worse, I didn’t even like shedding my own skin in order to become someone else. 

That’s the point where I realised who was always making all the costumes and sets. Spending so much time behind the sewing machine, the logical school of choice became Fashion Academy. But already in my second year it started feeling off. The problem was, I was not half bad at designing. So being already halfway, (and not a quitter), I tailored the studies to my needs, for six months I went to Australia to do a minor in graphic design at RMIT (Melbourne). Meanwhile I studied part-time photography, not particularly because I wanted to be a photographer, it just seemed a practical skill. 

After graduation I had a short flirt with working-life for a fashion brand, and a soul searching expedition in Italy that took as long as learning the language, before I decided to add a masters degree to my belt. At this point, people in my social circle started scratching their heads, trying to label me. After all, wasn’t it about time to start acting like the professional I should have become by then? Two years of studying at the prestigious Design Academy Eindhoven, and I graduated, again.

To celebrate (or procrastinate) I sold 90% of my belongings in order to travel the world. Just for one year I decided, but a year quickly turned into three. So many amazing opportunities present themselves when you’re completely free from having to attend work every day. Living on a shoestring, I took part in a large scale art project for the Philadelphia art Alliance, worked as a photographer in both Verona and Florence, helped reconstruct the famous Djenne Mosque out of mud in Mali, and documented friends building a suite in the famous Icehotel in Lapland. Four summers in a row I ran the coolest Pinhole Project at Burning Man, where we exposed and developed large scale analog pinhole prints. In. A. Desert. All the while I worked for room and board and/or travel expenses. Sometimes ‘work’ meant art or photography, sometimes it meant cleaning a bathroom. It was epic. I was about to embark on the Tres Hombres ship as a cook, to traverse the Atlantic Ocean on their way to pick up rum from the Caribbean, when cupido struck. So that ship -literally- sailed. But only weeks after I found myself and my new love Sven walking from Bulgaria to Turkey with a donkey, a violin and a dutch ‘poffertjespan’.  Communicating with locals and gypsies alike, through music and food. 

I settled down with Sven in Amsterdam, and surprisingly found myself doing more and more photography. Slowly my career started to take shape: from photographing for a lot of (film)festivals I rolled into theatre photography, and I really loved it. In return: companies in the cultural sector liked to work with me because I could fix a costume in between shooting backstage. I can design sets for campaign images, and even do the complete graphics for a poster or flyer. In a creative industry where money is not always abundant, such millepedes are warmly welcomed. With my photography, I like to create different worlds, not unlike stage director. Finally I’ve seemed to have arrived where I was headed from the beginning: in theatre.