I make work people don't scroll past.

I grew up poor in Newark, New Jersey to a single mom who later died of leukemia. Our Christmas gifts came from donation baskets from a hospital and that's how I got introduced to my first camera: an N64 controller via Pokémon Snap - a game where the entire mechanic was photographing creatures in the wild, framing them just right, and getting graded on the shot by none other than Professor Oak himself, who was ruthless in his critiques. I was hooked before I knew it counted as anything.

I went to college for theatre with a concentration in acting and studied improv + sketch comedy writing at the Upright Citizens Brigade in NYC, which sounds like a left turn but wasn't. Acting taught me how to read a room, hold attention, and understand what an image is actually doing emotionally before it does anything visually. Most photographers don't have that training. It shows up in every frame I make.

I met my husband while studying abroad in England. We've been married for fourteen years. He's been there for every version of me — the one who didn't know if she was a photographer yet, the one who broke through, and the one who's now building so she can own what she labors.

I started uploading to Pexels almost a decade ago, at the suggestion of a mentor. The work caught on quickly — moody, emotionally specific, the kind of editorial photography that wasn't really on the platform yet. I earned Pexels Hero status (a recognition given to a small fraction of contributors) and have held it ever since. My portfolio has hit 1M+ monthly views consistently since 2017.

The work landed everywhere. A portrait I shot of Facebook's civil rights counsel, Julie Wenah, ended up in Forbes and AfroTech. My photography has been used by Forbes, BBC, Cosmopolitan, Yahoo, Psychology Today, HuffPost, BuzzFeed, Canva, Figma, Notion, and dozens more across the internet.

I figured out something most stock photographers never do: the algorithm doesn't reward volume — it rewards specificity. Make one image that says exactly what one person is feeling, and that one image will outwork a hundred generic ones.

I'm an born and raised Jersey girl who has been around the world, but I live in Denver now. I'm a major night owl, a Cancer Sun / Aries Moon / Taurus Rising. I work across photography, UX design, brand strategy, writing, and web development — and I've stopped apologizing for being interested in all of them. The work is better when the same person who shoots the image also writes the caption, designs the page it lives on, and built the brand it's selling.

These days I run Shamia The Creative as the umbrella for everything I make. Underneath it: Salvage Archive, a membership platform filled with my art and tools for other creatives doing the deep, weird, personal work. Commissioned wooden-tile letter photography for brands. A novella in progress. And The Salvage — a newsletter that runs as the voice and relationship layer for the Archive, where I write about the work behind the work, the strange and quiet parts of building a creative life.

I'm not interested in being everywhere. I'm interested in making things worth finding.