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 dreamed that I’d one day write for the Inquirer, nor did I foresee the Bulletin’s closing as a harbinger of an ever-shifting media landscape that I’d one day be navigating. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t set out to be a writer, a photographer, or a videographer. I set my sites on New York and took on work as it came, which included waiting tables while developing a career as a set designer. My work eventually 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 was living at the Chelsea Hotel, where I paid $200 a month plus fresh flowers for the lobby, but that’s a story for another day. I didn’t go to college until my mid-thirties. 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 Graduate School of 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 for the Jesuits at Fordham University. Today, alongside freelance work, I manage editorial for the alumnae magazine of Barnard College, the women’s college at Columbia—having essentially swapped the patriarchy for the matriarchy.