Who am I? Good question.

One of my least favorite things to do  is having to talk about myself, and I have an unfinished resume draft that has been wasting away in my laptop for about two years to prove it. But, here we are. Lets start by listing some facts? I'm a first generation child of Soviet Union immigrants, born in Brooklyn,  but raised primarily on the exotic Isla de Staten (Staten Island.)  The forgotten borough and I had a love/mostly hate relationship, but I'll save you the small town girl with big city dreams spiel. I grew up in the internet generation where social media platforms like myspace were growing up with me. My first love as far as media is concerned was photography. In middle school I lived on websites like MySpace and Xanga (remember?!) where I stalked amateur photography websites and dreamed of creating images of my own. I was finally able to save up for a DSLR, and went snap happy. Me and my best friend would run all over the borough finding fields and abandoned houses for her to model in for me, and those photos would be immediately uploaded to myspace for all of our peers to see. Unfortunately (or not) these artistic experiments are lost on an old hard drive and whatever Justin Timberlake left of MySpace (I can't remember my login info anyway.)

In high school I decided to get more serious and took a pre-college digital photography course at the School of Visual Arts. All though I did enjoy it, it was very intimidating and ended up discouraging me from photography. Every now and then my love affair with my camera comes back via documentation of travel (my other love.) Traveling is what makes me happiest in life, and my list of places to see is exponentially expanding. I've spent the last few years of my life working, saving, traveling, rinse and repeat. The amount of checks on my list are not many, but there ones i'm proud of. I have a since abandoned tumblr showcasing a tiny collection of photos from my adventures (that I should probably update) which I'll link below.

As far as the subject matter of this class, most of my information about feminism has come from social media. Yes, tumblr has been my greatest educator on feminism and social justice; sad, but true. Most of the terms and buzzwords from the list, i've heard being thrown around on peoples blogs, but i'm excited to understand them in a more academic context. I'm drawn the most to body image and it's relationship with media because I feel thats where it's left it's most visible mark. I see it's effect everyday in me, friends, family and women the world over.

Okay, I guess that wasn't so bad.

Have a photo:

Florence, Italy.

And a link:

http://crmsnclvr.tumblr.com/