I was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan and in 1989 my family flew to New York for a summer vacation and just never went home.  You could say that the family motto is “to be spontaneous, to be flexible, and to trust your intuition”. My formative years were spent in a small suburban town in Hudson Valley, NY where my immigrant status and lack of access to television allowed me to form a creative and critical lens to view the world.  I spent my summers reading, drawing, and writing precocious complaint letters on a typewriter. While living on the banks of the Hudson ( on the bucolic campus of Bard College) I learned all about the ways of cultural hegemony and how to properly worship the avant-garde.  No narrative? No sound? Do an interpretative dance to a scene from the Phaedrus? No problem, DONE!

I then spent several years living in Harlem, N.Y. and teaching special education students at a middle school in the Bronx as a N.Y.C. Teaching Fellow.  I  attended evening classes and earned a M.S. in Elementary Education from Mercy College.  After a stint as a volunteer farm worker in Italy (a dream fulfilled) I returned to New York to pursue a B.S. in Art Education from S.U.N.Y. New Paltz. I was able to dedicate myself to the process of creation, to the joy of making art.  I took courses in various media and loved it all. I cried tears of joy when I finished my first piece of furniture in a woodworking class.  Out of curiosity I interned at Art21 (a PBS series on contemporary art) and worked with teachers from all over the country on developing ways to integrate contemporary art into the K-12 curriculum.

In 2009 I bicycled from Portland to Eugene, OR with my father on a permaculture tour and made the decision to move to that beautiful part of the country.    A chain of serendipitous events led me to a dream job at Trillium Charter School (it involves a taco truck, cob fence building party, and a friendly neighbor).   For two years I was privileged to teach visual art to children from kindergarten to high school.  During the summer of 2011 I participated in a curriculum development seminar in South Africa as part of the Fulbright-Hays program.  I collaborated with a group of social studies and art teachers from all over the United States to develop curriculum integrating the two subjects.  You can read more about that experience here.  That magical opportunity led me to my previous position at Friends Academy, a Quaker school on the north shore of Long Island.   In 2014 I spent a few weeks making maps with strangers in Barcelona, Spain as a visiting artist at Jiwar.  I just moved to Philadelphia will be teaching at William Penn Charter School in the fall!

Feel free to get in touch. I would love to hear from you.