Our family has a 110-year unbroken history at Chautauqua, most of those years as cottage owners. As a child I became bored with the sports-oriented Girls Club program and enrolled in an art class at the Quadrangle taught by Victoria Valentine. During that time, I exhibited and won prizes at the annual Clothesline Art Show at Bestor Plaza. And later, as a teen, I studied painting with Revington Arthur.

I attended Interlochen Arts Academy where I majored in Drawing and Painting, and Printmaking. After a foundation year at Kansas City Art Institute, I earned my BFA in Fashion design from Rhode Island School of Design and spent my professional years working in that industry, with a focus on Cut & Sew Knits, with fit, balance, and decorative seaming as my passions.

In 2019 I retired from the hustle of the fashion industry in New York City, to the serenity of the southern New Mexico desert with its long unbroken views and vast skies. I have begun painting again after a nearly 50-year hiatus. It feels good. Usually, our stunning landscapes are my inspiration, but as a longtime tropical fish geek, I began painting fish, perhaps an unconscious need to bring the alien, but yearned for, element of water to my desert life.