I grew up in Cincinnati, OH and attended 12 years of Catholic school. I played basketball and volleyball, listened to Top 40 radio and had a perm. I arrived at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1992 wearing a hooded sweatshirt and Umbro athletic shorts. I finished art school in 1997 and moved to NYC, wearing combat boots and a thrift store dress and carrying a stack of Fugazi and Sebadoh CDs.

I moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn and worked as a freelance art-handler and then in a Chelsea gallery. During a summer of 2000 fellowship in Skowhegan, I began painting with gouache on paper. I started Yale's MFA painting program in 2002. I won a traveling scholarship and visited France, Germany and Austria. I decided I wanted to live in Berlin after Yale, so I started learning German. In 2004, I moved to Berlin for a year with a DAAD scholarship.

After Berlin, I moved back to the Midwest with my future husband, a German philosophy professor who had decided to go to law school in Chicago. I have lived in Chicago since 2005, teaching drawing and painting at the Art Institute and Northwestern. Our daughter Olive was born here in May 2008.