I was born and raised in Loveland, Colorado, where in high school I was one of 55 American students selected from across the US to participate in the first USA-USSR Youth Summit, broadcast to an audience of 240 million on PBS and Soviet Channel One. As a result of that experience, I set off to pursue a B.A. in Russian and Russian Studies at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin.  After receiving my degree, I decided to live and work in the Russian Far East. My first professional adventure was on the World Discoverer Cruise Ship, presenting cultural lectures and providing language interpretation on six cruises for tourists visiting indigenous villages and local sites in remote regions of Chukotka in the Arctic. I then took a position as a staff assistant and translator at the Joint Scientific Center “Arktika” in Magadan. However, after enduring a winter of minus 50-degree temperatures, I moved south to Khabarovsk. There, I spent three years as a project manager for Ton Vic Alaska Corp, an American company registered in Russia, which produced and shipped value-added lumber products to Japan and Indonesia.

After traveling through Europe, I returned to the States, and settled in Denver, where I worked as a case manager and Russian-English interpreter in social work for five years. I had had some very intriguing spiritual experiences while in Russia and their impact would not go away. I began looking into Christianity, and ended up on a journey that would bring me into the Catholic Church and later lead me to enter a cloistered monastery of Poor Clare nuns from Mexico. I spent nearly a decade pursuing religious life as a cloistered sister and later more years in an apostolic community in Pittsburgh. While there, I worked as a Study Abroad Advisor for La Roche University and had the opportunity to co-design and co-lead a short-term course to Moscow and St. Petersburg in 2017. Each religious community I lived in was richly cross-cultural and multi-lingual in composition with sisters from all over the world in them. My years as a nun gave me unique understandings and unusual skills. I ended up leaving that form of life to develop my career in International Education by pursuing a master's degree. Although I have recently completed my degree, with distinction, at the Middlebury Institute, I continue to work with Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA, in the International Student Services Office.

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One of my hobbies is journaling, which I have done for years. I enjoy hiking, spending time at the beach, and exploring the world via travel and books. I practice meditation and contemplative prayer daily. I am interested in further exploring work and the development of experiential learning programs that encompass the intersectionality of spiritual practice, inter-religious dialogue, cross-cultural engagement, language learning, and international education.

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