I’ve lived nearly my whole life in Louisville. I attended Centre College for 4 years where I majored in English and minored in Art and Psychology. After college, I lived in Chicago for a year, working and living in an artist’s loft with 6 other friends and a dog. All of my loftmates were students at the School of the Art institute of Chicago. This experience was a full-on immersion into the creative art world in a big city, in both visual and performance. It was a valuable time that would shape who I would become. Upon moving back to Louisville, I worked on post-baccalaureate studies in Painting, Drawing, and Photography at U of L. It was a time to put my post-Centre, and post-Chicago interests to work.
My teaching career started in 2003, after working in various education related jobs. In 2018, I jumped at the opportunity to join the Highland Pres Kindergarten team, becoming the art specialist, with Blaine Hicks the reading specialist. I was immediately in love with the Reggio-Emilia influence of the school, an approach that uses the children’s ideas as the basis and direction for project work. Since the Kindergartners have previously explored many materials of Art in their preschool years with Ms. Wirth and Ms. Melo, I have the wonderful opportunity to work with them on projects that are more involved, detailed and take more time to finish. Each year the Kindergarten class finishes their year with a landscape painting.
I believe art is a subject that is slowly vanishing from the classroom and this saddens me greatly. It is my hope that each child will leave Kindergarten exposed to more art, have a love of art, and want to continue it to their capacity.
I currently live with my dog Georgie, my cat Mary Frances, and my home is a revolving door for my grown children to come take walks or hikes with me and have impromptu dinners. I am a plein air painter, and continue to work in my studio as well. Besides walking and hiking, I am an avid cyclist. I have traveled extensively, especially to areas devoted to preservation of art and architecture.