I was born in Philadelphia and raised in South Jersey. There, I grew up reading The Bulletin, which was eventually absorbed into the The Philadelphia Inquirer. I never throught I’d one day write for the Inquirer. I didn’t set out to be a writer, a photographer, or a videographer. I set my sites on New York and took work as it came, which included waiting tables while developing a career as a set designer. My sets appeared in the pages of Architectural Digest, the windows of Harvey Nichols in London, and at Giorgio Armani in New York. In those days I lived at the Chelsea Hotel, where I paid $200 a month plus fresh flowers for the lobby, but that’s a story for another day. After 9/11 I, like so many New Yorkers, I took stock of my life and shifted gears. I enrolled at Lehman College in the Bronx. There, I studied English lit and photography. On completing my master’s as a Bollinger Fellow at Columbia Journalism I wrote features for the Inquirer, then on architecture and urbanism forThe Wall Street Journal, The Architect's Newspaper, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. I eventually left reporting to work in communications at Fordham University and later at Barnard College, Columbia University. Today, I freelance and I am based out of Queens, where I live with my husband and two dogs. In my downtime, I explore the borough’s many food markets, try new recipes, and knit socks.