My junior year at Swarthmore College, seemingly a bit late in a college career, I added Theater to a nearly finished English degree, inspired by a new set design professor as well as a budding interest in Shakespearean, minority and world drama. William McNeil Marshall taught by pointing out both good and problematic aspects of a student's work, whether from a design or rendering standpoint. He drew on the fine arts, and clearly focused on both my widespread international travel as a child and also the photography course I had taken at the University of Chicago from former Life/Time photographer Joel Snyder, in order to teach me to render and design from an international, intellectual, and highly artistic standpoint.

Although Professor Marshall pushed me to attend the University of Ohio in Akron, I decided to follow my graduate career first at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and then later at the Ohio State University. Joe Brandesky's inspiring class in Czech Theatre while he assembled the Czech Theatre Design show at OSU reminded me of the excitement I felt when I first began theatre with William McNeil Marshall. Building bridges between students in instructors, team members and production members becomes crucial to a student's and artist's career, and I teach through these instructor's examples.

While in an unrelated class, and between my two graduate schools, I met up with the Director of Continuing Education at the Education Management Corporation, the Art Insitute of Pittsburgh branch. I was hired to first teach animatronics in the Design and Artisan Technology Programs, based off the property work I had done for Two Gentlemen of Verona at Carnegie Mellon University. By the end of my stay at AIP, I was using Life Drawing skills learned in Costume Design classes to teach animation and animal anatomy. We arranged for a number of days drawing animal action poses behind the scenes at the Pittsburgh Zoo. The project work my students handed in was fantastic, and their reaction convinced me that learning is better done in a tactile setting. Meanwhile, to be closer to my family, I transferred to the Illinois Institute of Art, another of EDMC's colleges, where I taught multimedia, web design and animation history.

I find recently in lectures I refer again and again to Shakespeare and American Drama, Theatre and Art History, and tie together all the disparate aspects of my artistic career.