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Born in Evansville, Indiana
B. A. Fine Arts (Graphic Design emphasis)

Washington State University, 1981

Master of Library and Information Science

University of Texas at Austin, 1993

Fields of work

Graphic and information design

Areas of interest outside work

Laughter, walking and hiking, yoga, gardening, Eastern and herbal healing, people, reading, music of all kinds

I would say that my life's direction has been influenced by three driving passions: nature, art and organization.

I was born in Indiana and moved with my family to Washington state at the age of one. I grew up in a small town outside of Seattle Washington on a mountain that became the inspiration for my first passion: nature. Living in this relatively rural environment and helping my parents with their gardens, I developed a deep appreciation for all that the earth has to offer. I can't remember a day when at least part wasn't spent exploring, hiking or walking on the mountain where we lived.

Growing up in a house where music and theater arts were ever-present fostered in me a passion for art — in all its forms. I didn't have as much talent in music or theater as the rest of my family. Instead, I directed my creative talents to making functional objects out of found materials. Rocks, recycled phone books, dried thistle flowers, metal clothes hangars, cedar bark, empty soda bottles — all were just waiting to be turned into something useful, if not beautiful!

In high school I took several years of mechanical and architectural drawing and loved the challenge of merging aesthetic with functional values in one of our main projects: design a small house. I was thrilled to figure out how to organize the physical living space for comfort and society, while making it beautiful. In this design, my passion for nature entered back into the picture: among all the required floor plans and roof details that I produced for the house were many, many detail drawings for the natural stone fireplace which was to be the centerpiece of the house.

After spending two years following an architecture major at the university, I switched to fine arts, specifically graphic design and photography. I've never lost my appreciation for architecture, I just realized that it was the visual/spatial/experiential aspects of architecture that fascinated me. Studying fine art gave me every opportunity to feed that fascination and to expand it to include not only the art of architecture around the world, but of the seemingly endless variety of human creations that fill the need for function and beauty in our daily lives.

During my undergraduate studies I spent 7 months in Japan, mostly Tokyo. This had a tremendous impact on me in many ways, but as far as molding the direction that my life was taking it did several things:

• I learned to love simplicity and to appreciate how difficult it often is to arrive at simple solutions.
• My appreciation for nature became absolute reverence.
• And last, but far from least, I learned that no matter how thoughtful I might be in developing a visual design, arriving at an opinion or nurturing a philosophy, there are always a multitude of other, equally legitimate designs, opinions and philosophies in the world.

After my time in Tokyo, I moved to Seattle. Finding a job in graphic design proved to be difficult, so I took an intensive course in aerospace drafting and was hired by Boeing Aircraft Company to work in the wiring group during the development phase of the 767. I especially enjoyed the days when I needed to climb around in the full-sized mockup plane to see the best ways to route wires around all the other mechanicals. After the roll-out of the first plane, I left Boeing and worked in photo labs and restaurants, took more courses in art and history, nursed a fledgling freelance graphic design business, and lived in the heady atmosphere that was Seattle in the early 80's. ( The dot-com's, grunge music style and coffee fanaticism were about to put Seattle on the world radar.) These were exhilarating years.

But my time in Japan whet my appetite for travel. As much as I loved Seattle, I wanted to travel again — to experience that exhilaration of learning about the art, lives and philosophies of new people and places. And so I set out to see places in the U.S.A. I had never seen before. Eventually I went to Texas where Schlumberger hired me as a CAD/CAM drafting technician at their center in Austin. I was soon illustrating technical documents, providing the odd graphics for presentations and product identity and publishing technical and user documents. During these years I earned my Master's Degree in Library and Information Science. And then came the web. The world of documentation and communication inside and outside the company exploded.

Thirteen years after I began working for Schlumberger, I was transferred to New York where I worked in the Communications and Investor Relations department with an exceptional group of people. I learned a great deal about high-level corporate communications and continued to build on and develop my design and information organization skills. SEED was just beginning to grow when I arrived in New York and I'm honored to have been involved in the program from — almost — the beginning. It's a pleasure to work for a program that is a synthesis of my three passions. Nature because SEED sponsors and encourages environmental studies and workshops around the world. Art and organization because both are key aspects in developing and presenting information on a web site.

I've seen SEED grow from an inspired idea to a dynamic venue for the creative, environmental and scientific sharing between the youth of this planet and the volunteers that make the program happen. With the dedication of so many volunteers, I look forward to seeing these interactions increase dramatically.