I became more formally interested in art when I started taking classes in high school. I was fortunate enough to receive a Best of Show award in a regional contest for a self portrait I had done as an assignment. This was, of course, a great encouragement for me. I was very interested in computer animation and entered college with the idea of getting a Computer Science degree with an Art minor.

I started college at the University of Minnesota, Morris in the fall of 1995. It soon became clear that Computer Science was not for me, and before long I had switched my major to Studio Art. I took a variety of classes in drawing, painting, photography, and digital art, but my major emphasis was in sculpture. There are more examples of the work I did during college on my fine art portfolio page.

I got married in June, 1997 and in August my husband and I did a study-abroad program through the UMM Art History Department to Italy for our honeymoon. We were there for about a month and got the opportunity to see many famous works of art as well as a lot of beautiful countryside. In specific we studied Padua, Venice and Florence. It was a very inspirational trip.

I got my B.A. in 1999 with a double major in Studio Art and Art History. I was also interested in graphic design and had taught myself Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark through my work-study jobs at school. You can see some additional samples of this work on my graphic art portfolio page.

Work was scarce in the small town where I went to college, and so for the year after I graduated I wasn't able to do anything to enhance my skills, except what I could do on my own time. With no access to many of the tools needed for sculpture, I turned to digital art and put a great deal of effort into the completion of a collaborative piece a friend and I had begun our senior year. It was a photomosaic, comprised of 900 images which we scanned and placed to create a portrait using Photoshop. We were delighted that UMM had an alumni exhibit that year and we were able to enter the finished piece. The Art Department chose to add our entry to their permanent collection and it is now on display in the Humanities Fine Arts building. This was another very encouraging moment for me.

The following year I got a job in Southern Minnesota working at The Free Press in the Creative Department making ads. I was only there for about six months but I was able to enhance many of the graphic skills I had developed in college and I really enjoyed the opportunity to design inserts and some of the larger ads.

In the spring of 2001 we moved to San Francisco. I was under the impression that the job market for graphic design was promising, but soon learned that I couldn't have been more wrong. I took a job as an administrative assistant at a law firm and continued to make art in my spare time. It was about this time that I started getting more involved in crafts, since I had little access to the tools or space for making any other type of art. I began knitting and making jewelry and took a community college class in stained glass. Some samples of this work can be found on my craft portfolio page.

In July of 2005 I began working in my current position at the Meyer Lab at UC Berkeley, again as an administrative assistant. In addition to my support role, I do graphic design for the lab as well, and am responsible for creating slides and illustrations for talks and journal articles. I even get to design the occasional journal cover like this one which was accepted by Developmental Cell. My next career goal is to become an ESL teacher and I'm currently taking classes toward that end. I also hope to start my own freelance graphic design business once I'm finished with my masters degree.